The 33-year-old father, Daud, was very happy when he learned that his wife was pregnant. But, unfortunately, he never got the chance to bring his babies home because he was told his twin boys died in the hospital. Before burying his sons and laying them to rest, Daud wanted to see their faces and was aghast when he found two dolls under the shrouds. “I opened the face of the first baby and saw there were no eyes. What was this? I began to open the face of the second one. The same. This was a doll…a doll,” Daud said in a video statement.
As he recalled the bizarre series of events, Daud claimed that he was told his babies were born on February 3, after which Laura was kept in the intensive care of the perinatal centre in southern Russia. Later, Laura recovered and was caring for their “healthy” babies on February 7 and 8. But by February 9, Daud was informed that their babies passed away due to cerebral hemorrhage, aneurysm. Because of the family’s religious beliefs, a postmortem was not performed and they began preparing for the funeral. Daud, mourning the loss of his babies, unwrapped the shrouds covering them only before their burial and couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
“Everyone was shocked… they were both just dolls. In disposable nappies, like real kids… After this we called the police,” Daud said. At first, Daud blamed the hospital and claimed, “my babies are alive.” He believed his sons may have become victims of a baby-selling or adoption racket, leading to a national scandal over abuse involving babies. In his account, the husband said he believed Laura was given two dead babies wrapped in “grave-clothes” before she left the hospital, but instead of giving them their “dead newborn twins,” Daud accused the hospital of giving them dolls. However, Daud discovered that the hospital could not have done anything to his newborn babies because he never had twin sons in the first place. His wife confessed that she was never pregnant and had been lying to Daud all along.
Talking about why she did it, the wife said, as quoted by the Daily Mail, “I saw how happy my husband was when I told him that I was pregnant. I didn’t want to upset him and therefore decided to lie to him and to our relatives by faking the pregnancy.” “I didn’t have a clear plan,” the wife went on to say. “Sometimes I felt as if my tummy was growing, I felt as if I was pregnant. In January I went to have a look at babies’ cots. It’s hard to explain, from one hand I knew I wasn’t pregnant, but I couldn’t stop pretending.” To keep her lie going, Laura rented an apartment close to the maternity hospital before informing her family that her children were dead. She also bought two dolls to pass off as the bodies of the newborn twins and had them wearing disposable diapers like real babies. “Then (at the burial) my husband unmasked my lies by finding the dolls instead of the babies,” she added.