Two families in Russia are suing their local maternity hospital for giving them the wrong babies 12 years ago. The truth only emerged after the ex-husband of one of the mothers refused to pay maintenance for their daughter, saying she looked nothing like him. DNA tests in the Kopeisk town showed she was not related to the parents. Police later traced the girl's natural parents, who were found to have been raising the other family's child. Neither girl wants to leave her home. The two families in the town in the Ural Mountains are now demanding 5m roubles (£101,000: $158,300) in damages. But they cannot press criminal charges against individual staff because so many years have passed since the babies were handed to the wrong parents. Wrong name tags When Yuliya Belyaeva got a divorce earlier this year, her former husband refused to pay alimony. He did not believe that he was the father of their daughter, Irina. So Ms Belyaeva took him to court. The judge ordered DNA tests to be carried out. Those tests revealed an astonishing truth. "We did two DNA tests," Yuliya told me by telephone from her home town. "Both tests showed that neither my ex-husband nor I were Irina's biological parents." "The judge couldn't believe it. She said she'd only seen cases like this on TV and didn't know what to advise us." Ms Belyaeva thought back to December 1998 and the day she had given birth to Irina. She remembered there had been one other woman in labour in her ward. She realised there had been a terrible mix-up: 12 years ago the two babies had been given the wrong name tags. And the wrong set of parents. "I made a photocopy of the DNA test results and went straight to the prosecutor's office. There I lodged an official complaint about being given the wrong baby in the maternity hospital."