A pair of identical twin girls have reunited after being separated at birth after miraculously finding each other through TikTok.
Amy Khvitia and Ano Sartania discovered they were in fact twins and had likely been sold at birth after tracking each other down through social media, and ended up uncovering the dark truth that they weren't the only ones to face such a fate.
As reported by the BBC, Amy had first seen Ano when her twin competed in a TV dance contest, and her friends and family had thought it was her performing under a different name.
However, the truth didn't come out until seven years later when Ano then stumbled across a video of Amy, this time on TikTok.
Amy had been at her godmother's house watching Georgia's Got Talent when she first clapped eyes on Ano, then 12, who was a contestant performing a jive.
She told the BBC: "Everyone was calling my mum and asking: 'Why is Amy dancing under another name?'"
When she told her family about the weird coincidence, they brushed it under the carpet, with her mother telling her: "Everyone has a doppelganger."
It wasn't until seven years later in November 2021 when a then-blue-haired Amy shared a video of herself getting her eyebrow pierced on TikTok, that Ano ended up seeing it from her home in Tbilisi - 200 miles away - after being sent the clip by a friend.
Again she noticed the likeness and didn't think too much into it, but shared the video in a university WhatsApp group to see if she could track down the creator and get in touch.
Someone who knew Amy reached out to her and she instantly knew that Ano was the girl she'd seen on Georgia's Got Talent all those years ago.
The pair started messaging and found out they had a lot in common, but some things did not add up.
While both of their places of birth were listed as the now non-existent Kirtskhi maternity hospital in western Georgia, their dates of birth were listed as a few weeks apart.
On paper, there was no chance of them being sisters, let alone twins, but Amy and Ano found that they were so similar in many ways, from the music they liked, and their love of dancing, to even getting their hair cut in the same way, as well as both having the same genetic disease called dysplasia, a disorder of the bones.
Amy admitted: "Every time I learned something new about Ano, things got stranger."
The pair ended up meeting in person a week later, and coming face to face for the first time they instinctually knew they were twins.
Amy said: "It was like looking in a mirror, the exact same face, exact same voice. I am her and she is me," as Ano added: "I don't like hugs, but I hugged her."
The pair ended up confronting their families, which is when they found out they were separated at birth and adopted as babies in 2002 to two different families, weeks apart.
The revelation left Amy feeling like her whole life had been a lie, while Ano admitted she was "angry and upset with my family, but I just wanted the difficult conversations to be over so that we could all move on."
They discovered that the details on their birth certificates, including their date of birth, were wrong, and did more digging on the circumstances surrounding their adoptions.
Both sets of parents, who were unable to have children of their own, had been told that there was an unwanted baby at the local hospital and that they would need to pay the doctors to be able to take them home and raise them as their own.
Neither family knew that the baby they'd taken in was a twin and hadn't realized it was illegal to 'buy' a child, despite handing over a large amount of money, as they believed it was legitimate due to Georgis being in a period of turmoil as well as the involvement of medical staff.
However, the twins have since discovered they were among tens of thousands of other babies in Georgia who had been taken from hospital after birth and sold over the decades, with the illegal practice thought to have begun in the 1950s and continued until as recently as 2005.
As of yet, nobody has been held to account despite official attempts to investigate.
Amy and Ano managed to also track down their birth mother, despite initially having reservations that she may have "sold them for profit", thanks to a Facebook group dedicated to reuniting Georgian families with children that had been illegally adopted at birth.
A young woman in Germany responded to say her mother had given birth to twin girls at that same hospital in 2002 and had been told her babies had died, but was beginning to have doubts about whether that was true.
A DNA test confirmed that the woman from the Facebook group was Amy and Ano's sister, and she was living with their mother Aza in Germany.
The Facebook group also has countless other posts from other mothers who were told their babies had died at birth but later found the deaths were not recorded, meaning their children could still be alive.
The initiative was set up by journalist Tamuna Museridze in 2021 after she discovered she was adopted after finding her birth certificate with incorrect details when she was clearing out her late mother's house.
She began the group to search for her own birth family but ended up uncovering the baby trafficking scandal which has spanned decades, and has helped reunite hundreds of families, despite not having managed to find her own yet.
Tamuna believes that corrupt officials helped to fake documents needed for the illegal adoptions, adding: "The scale is unimaginable, up to 100,000 babies were stolen. It was systemic."
The exact figure of how many children may be affected is impossible to verify due to many documents being lost, while others have not been released.
Tamuna alleges that many parents said that when they asked to see the bodies of their dead babies, they were told that they'd already been buried in the hospital grounds - however, it's since been show that cemeteries at Georgian hospitals never existed - while other parents were shown dead babies that had been frozen in the mortuary.
According to her research, it was expensive to buy a child - costing around a yearly salary - and many of the babies ended up in families around the world, including in the US, Canada, Cyprus, Russia, and Ukraine.
Since 2005, changes in Georgian adoption legislation and anti-trafficking laws have made illegal adoptions more difficult.
The Georgian government launched an investigation into historic child trafficking in 2022, however, it told the BBC that while it has spoken to more than 40 people, the cases were "very old and historic data has been lost".
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