In Dagestan, woman substitutes her 'newborn twins' with plastic dolls

In Dagestan, during the funeral of two newborn children, dolls were found in the shrouds. The story, that shocked so many, looked like a horror story, until it became known that the woman, whose babies should have been buried at the ancestral cemetery, deceived her husband and all her relatives. The woman did not give birth to those children, because she was not even pregnant,  but pretended to be for many months.

The story became public on February 10. A man named as Daud Daudov came to the police and said that he was taking his newborn twins from the Stavropol region of Russia to Dagestan to bury them in the family cemetery.

"When we were burying them, I was supposed to open their faces, so I pulled the shroud off the face of the first baby and I saw that he had no eyes. I removed the shroud from the face of the second one  and saw the same. They were dolls, small, like babies. In diapers," the man told the police.

The man assumed that his children were alive so he was hopeful that he was going to see them soon.

According to Daudov, when his wife returned home from the perinatal center, he called her from work to find out how she was feeling. The woman told her husband the terrible news that their children died. The man rushed home and saw the children there.

In his testimony, the man said that neither him nor his wife knew that there dolls wrapped in the shrouds."

The man's story attracted public attention immediately. It soon became known that doctors examined Daudov's wife and concluded that she was not pregnant. The woman had no breast milk, and the condition of her mammary glands did not change either.
 
The woman eventually had to confess that she had invented her pregnancy. She admitted that she had deceived her husband. She took a pregnancy test in June 2020, and it was positive, so the woman hurried to make her husband happy. Some time later, as a result of the medical examination, she found out that the test results were false. Yet, the woman decided not to tell her husband about it.

"I saw how happy my husband was when he found out that I was pregnant, so I didn't want to upset him ... For this reason, I decided to deceive my husband and relatives. I didn't have a clear plan," she said.

When nine months was drawing to an end, Daudov took his wife to Stavropol. In late January, she decided to go to a children's store to "see a crib for her children" and saw those baby dolls in the store.

After nine months passed, the woman began to think what to do next. On February 2, she told her relatives that she would go to the hospital, but did not allow them to go with her - she referred to coronavirus restrictions.

She took a taxi to the perinatal center, and, while sitting on a bench, found a daily rent apartment, where she decided to stay for the upcoming week. She soon decided to buy those dolls that she earlier saw in the store.

On February 9, the woman decided to return home. She wrapped the dolls in the shrouds, filled them with sand to make them heavier, and called a taxi. When at home, she told relatives that she gave birth to twins, but the babies died of brain haemorrhage.

The story received extensive coverage in the media and attracted a lot of public attention. The head of the Stavropol region, Vladimir Vladimirov, had to release an official statement in connection with the scandal. He called the situation "very strange" and promised to personally investigate it.

"We haven't had stillbirths for a long time in the region. As far as I know, we have never had double stillbirths," he said. The head of the region called on everyone who was involved in this story to apologize, adding that the story was "a lesson for the future for all."

However, human rights activists believe that the real reason for the scandal may lie in the pressure that women in the Caucasus have to experience due to local customs and patriarchal ideas about the role of women in families.