Amy and Anna are identical twins, but right after they were born, they were taken from their mother and sold to different families.
Years later, they found each other by accident thanks to a TV talent show and a TikTok video.
And as they began to investigate the past, they discovered that they were among the thousands of babies in Georgia who had been stolen from hospitals and sold as far back as 2005.
They now demand answers.
Amy roams around a hotel room in the German city of Leipzig.
"I'm scared, I'm really scared," he says, fidgeting nervously.
"I haven't slept in a whole week. This is my chance to finally get some answers about what happened to us."
Her twin sister Ano is sitting in an armchair, watching TikTok videos on her phone.
"This is the woman who may have sold us out," she says, rolling her eyes.
Ano admits that she is also nervous, but only because she does not know how she will react and whether she will be able to suppress her anger.
It is the end of their long journey.
They traveled from Georgia all the way to Germany, hoping to find the missing piece of the puzzle.
He will finally meet his biological mother.
The last two years have been putting together a picture of what happened.
As they discovered the truth, they realized that over the decades there were tens of thousands of other people in Georgia who were also taken from hospitals as babies and sold.
Despite official attempts to investigate what happened, no one has yet been held accountable.
- Deliberately Separated: Identical twins who have discovered their secret sister or brother
- How criminals buy babies on Nairobi's black market
- "They gave me money and I want my son"
- Missing babies and their parents: "Our children are priceless"
The story of how Amy and Ano discovered each other began when they were 12 years old.
Amy Hvitija was in her godmother's house near the Black Sea watching her favorite TV show Georgia has talent.
There was a jive girl who looked exactly like her.
She didn't just look alike, she was identical.
"Everyone was calling my mom to ask, 'Why is Amy dancing under a different name?'" she says.
Amy mentioned it to her family, but they just dismissed it.
"Everyone has a double," her mother said.
Seven years later, in November 2021, Amy posted a video of herself with blonde hair getting her eyebrow pierced on TikTok.
About 320 kilometers away, in Tbilisi, another 19-year-old, Ano Sartania, received the video from a friend.
She thought it was "cool that that girl looks like me".
Ano tried to find the girl with the pierced eyebrow online, but couldn't find her, so she shared the video on a university Vocap group to see if anyone could help her.
Someone who knew Amy saw the message and connected them through Facebook.
Amy immediately knew that Ano was the girl she had seen years ago on the show Georgia has talent.
"I've been looking for you for a long time!", she wrote in the message.
"Me too," answered Ano.
Over the next few days, they discovered they had a lot in common, but not everything made sense.
Both were born in the now-defunct Kirtski Maternity Hospital in western Georgia, but according to their birth certificates, their birthdays were weeks apart.
They couldn't even be sisters, let alone twins.
But there were too many similarities.
They liked the same music, both liked to dance and even wore the same hairstyle.
They discovered they had the same genetic disease, a bone disorder called dysplasia.
They felt like they were unraveling a mystery together.
"Every time I learned something new about Anna, it got weirder," says Amy.
They agreed to meet, and a week later, as Amy approached the escalators at Rustaveli metro station in Tbilisi, she and Ano met in person for the first time.
"It was like looking at yourself in a mirror, identical face, identical voice. I'm her and she's me," Amy says.
She knew immediately that they were twins.
"I don't like to hug, but I hugged her," says Ano.
They each decided to face their family and find out the truth for the first time.
They were adopted, separately, a few weeks apart, in 2002.
Amy was upset and felt that her whole life had been a lie.
Dressed head-to-toe in black, she looks dangerous, but she nervously fiddles with a studded necklace and wipes a mascara-smeared tear from her cheek.
"It's a crazy story," she says.
"But it's true."
Ano was "furious and angry at the family" but just wanted the difficult conversation to end so everyone could move on.
Digging deeper, the twins found various details on their official baptism certificates, including that their birth dates were wrong.
Unable to have children, Amy's mother says a friend told her there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital.
She would have to pay for the doctors, but she could take her home and raise her as her own.
Ano's mother was told the same story.
Watch the video: Who steals children in Kenya
None of the families who adopted her knew the girls were twins, and despite paying a lot of money to adopt them, they claim they didn't realize it was illegal.
Georgia was going through a difficult period of turmoil and since the hospital staff was involved in everything, they thought everything was legal.
Neither family wanted to reveal how much money they paid.
The twins couldn't help but wonder if their biological parents had sold them to make money.
Amy wanted to start looking for her biological mother to find out, but Ano wasn't so sure about that.
“Why do you want to meet the person who might have betrayed us?” she asked.
Amy found a Facebook group dedicated to reuniting Georgia families with children suspected of being adopted illegally at birth and posted her story there.
A young woman from Germany replied, saying that her mother had given birth to twins at the Kirtski Maternity Hospital in 2002 and that despite being told the babies had died, she now doubted it.
A DNA test revealed that the girl from the Facebook group is their sister and lives with their biological mother Az in Germany.
Amy was eager to meet Aza, but Ano was more suspicious of the idea.
"That's the person who might have sold you, she won't tell you the truth," she warned.
Despite everything, she agreed to travel with Amy to Germany to support her.
The Facebook group used by the twins, Vedzeb, which means "I'm looking" in Georgian.
It contains countless posts from mothers who claim that hospital staff told them their babies had died, only to later discover that the deaths had not been recorded and that their children could be alive.
Other posts are from children like Amy and Anna, who are looking for biological parents.
The group has more than 230.000 members and, along with access to DNA sites, has exposed a dark chapter in Georgian history.
It was founded by journalist Tamuna Museridze in 2021 after she learned that she was adopted.
She found her baptismal certificate with wrong details when she was cleaning her late mother's house.
She started the group to search for her own family, but the group eventually exposed a baby-trafficking scandal that affected tens of thousands of people and lasted for decades.
She has helped reunite hundreds of families, but she has yet to find her own.
Tamuna discovered a black market for adoption that spanned the whole of Georgia and started in the early 2006s and lasted until XNUMX.
She believes it was run by organized criminals and included people from all walks of life, from taxi drivers to people high up in government.
"The scale is unimaginable, up to 100.000 babies were stolen. It was systemic," she says.
- Do you have a lost twin?
- Parental wars: What if mom or dad kidnaps the child
- Disappearance of children: What happens in Serbia when a parent reports the case
- "I saw a child once in three months": Why are children taken from Ukrainians in Western Europe
Tamuna explains that she arrived at this figure by counting the number of people who contacted her and combining that with the time period and the spread of cases across the country.
Without access to the documents - some lost and others unpublished - it is impossible to confirm the exact figure.
Tamuna says that many parents told her that when they asked to see the bodies of the dead babies, they were told that they had already been buried in the hospital grounds.
In the meantime, she found out that cemeteries in the grounds of Georgian hospitals never existed.
In other cases, parents would be shown dead babies that had been frozen in the morgue.
Tamuna says it was expensive to buy a child, about 1.000 maneti ($1.400) for a girl and 1.500 maneti ($2.100) for a boy - roughly a year's salary in Georgia.
She revealed that some children ended up with foreign families in the US, Canada, Cyprus, Russia and Ukraine.
In 2006, Georgia changed its adoption legislation and strengthened anti-trafficking laws, making illegal adoptions more difficult.
Another person looking for answers is Irina Otarashvili.
She gave birth to twins in a maternity hospital in Kvareli, at the foot of the Georgian Caucasus in 1978.
Doctors told her the boys were healthy, but for reasons never explained, they didn't bring her babies.
Three days after they were born, she was told that they had both died suddenly.
The doctor told her that they had respiratory problems.
Nothing was clear to Irina and her husband, but especially in Soviet times, "you didn't question the authorities," she says.
She believed everything they told her.
They were asked to bring a suitcase to carry the remains of the newborns and bury them in a cemetery or in their own backyard, as was the custom to do with babies at the time.
The doctor told them not to open the suitcase because it would upset them too much to see their bodies.
Irina did as she was told, but 44 years later, her daughter Nino found Tamuna's Facebook group and became suspicious.
“What if our brothers didn't really die?” she wondered.
Nino and her sister Nana decided to dig up the suitcase.
"My heart was beating like crazy," she says.
"When we opened it, there were no bones inside, only a twig. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry."
She says local police confirmed the contents of the suitcase were vine branches and there were no signs of human remains.
Now she believes her long-lost brothers might be alive.
At a hotel in Leipzig, Amy and Anna prepare to meet their biological mother.
Ano says that she has changed her mind and wants to quit.
But it was only a momentary weakness and, taking a deep breath, she decides to continue anyway.
Their biological mother, Aza, is waiting nervously in the next room.
Amy hesitantly opens the door and Ano follows, almost pushing her sister into the room.
Aza jumps up and hugs them both tightly, one twin on each side.
Minutes pass and neither of them says anything as they hug each other.
Tears stream down Amy's cheeks, but Ano remains stoic and steadfast.
She even seems a little irritated.
The three of them sit down to talk in private.
Later, the twins say that their mother explained that she fell ill after giving birth and fell into a coma.
When she woke up, the hospital staff told her that shortly after they were born, the babies had died.
Azo says that meeting Amy and Ano gave new meaning to her life.
Although they are not close, they are still in touch.
- Gemini by profession
- They are and are not twins
- Woman from Split gave birth to quadruplets, but not twins: Doctors say "rare case"
In 2022, the Georgian government launched an investigation into historical child trafficking.
She told the BBC that she had spoken to more than 40 people, but that the cases were "very old and the historical data has been lost".
Journalist Tamuna Museridze says she shared the information, but the government has not announced when it will release the results of the investigation.
She tried at least four times to uncover what really happened.
These efforts include a 2003 investigation into international child trafficking, which led to numerous arrests, but little information has been released to the public.
And in 2015, after another investigation, the Georgian media reported that the general director of the Rustavi Maternity Hospital, Aleksandre Baravkovi, was arrested, but that he was cleared of all suspicions and had returned to work.
The BBC approached the Georgian Ministry of the Interior for more information on individual cases, but was told that specific details would not be released for data protection reasons.
Tamuna has now joined forces with human rights lawyer Lia Muhashavrija to bring the victims' group's cases to Georgian courts.
They want the right to access their baptismal records, which is currently not possible under Georgian law.
They hope that this will help to solve this case once and for all.
"I always felt like something or someone was missing in my life," says Ano.
"I dreamed of a little girl in black following me and asking me how my day was."
That feeling disappeared when she found Amy.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter i Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
