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A woman raised the wrong daughter for 30 years after a hospital mix-up, while her biological daughter landed in an orphanage.
Zoya Tuganova, 70, from Russia, gave birth to her daughter at a hospital in Chelyabinsk, a city in west-central Russia, back in 1987.
When staff handed her a child she didn’t recognise, Zoya told them at the time that they’d switched her daughter.
However, this concern was dismissed by doctors. They assumed she was suffering a mental breakdown; and instead of investigating her claims, the hospital offered to send Zoya for psychiatric testing.
'Fair hair, white skin, large eyes'
"[My baby was born] with fair hair, white skin, large eyes. The next day when they brought a child for feeding I looked at her and [she had] a completely different face," Zoya recalls.
Zoya and her husband ended up raising their daughter, Katya, who suffers from a congenital heart disease.
As for Zoya’s biological daughter, she was raised by an alcoholic, who named the girl Lucia. The little girl apparently had to beg for money to buy food as neither of her parents worked.
When Lucia was just 13 years old, she was taken to an orphanage after her mother died of alcoholism and her father was imprisoned for murder.
Zoya claims she’s always been worried that she was raising someone else’s child, but didn’t investigate until after her husband’s death.
"I watched a [TV] show where two children got mixed up and I started crying out loud," she the grandmother of what inspired her search.
(Picture: Caters/Magazine Features)
Katya and Zoya eventually found Lucia, who has three children of her own.
A DNA test confirmed that the two girls had been swapped at birth.
Zoya has since filed a lawsuit claiming 3 million rouble (around R5m) in compensation.
Source: Magazine Features
