Discrepancy caught only 18 months later

Russian, Chechen babies switched at birth: report

MOSCOW (AFP)
Anna Androsova did not think twice about her newborn's blond hair and blue eyes, and Zarema Taysumova's took her dark-haired newborn home without a second thought about why he looked different than her. Neither woman looked at the name bracelet and for 18 months raised the babies as their own.More than two years later, however, a Russian hospital faces fines for negligence for switching a Russian baby and a Chechen baby, a newspaper reported on Monday.The saga began on March 1, 2007, when a nurse in the Oryol region located some 360 kilometres (220 miles) south of Moscow switched the two newborns' identifying blankets, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported.

The blankets bore the names of each infant: Adlan Taysumov, an ethnic Chechen, and Nikita Androsov, an ethnic Russian.Upon taking their sons home from the maternity ward, neither mother noticed the wrong family name on the babies' wrist bracelets.Nor did they raise any concerns about the babies' appearances, even though one was blonde and blue-eyed while the other was dark-haired with brown eyes, according to photographs printed in Komsomolskaya Pravda."I was so happy that I didn't even think of looking at the wrist band.... It didn't bother me that he was dark," Androsova, the mother of the Russian child, told the newspaper."I didn't even imagine he wasn't mine," the other mother, Taysumova, was quoted as saying.The Androsovs only caught the discrepancy on the wrist band 18 months later, but then Taysumova was not prepared to give up the baby she had nurtured for nearly a year and a half.The Taysumovs only agreed to swap back the children after two DNA tests and a court order.Meanwhile, the nurse responsible for the mix-up was fired, and the maternity ward was ordered to pay 150,000 rubles ($4,500) in damages to the Androsov family, who sued the hospital.