Latvian Woman Reunited With Snatched Son After 15-year Search

IRINA SUKHOVA mourned the loss of her infant son Vladimir after he vanished more than 15 years ago, but she never gave him up for dead.

Week after week, year after year, she devoted herself to finding her only child, who was abducted when she left him outside a shop in his pram.

When journalists lost interest, she advertised in the newspapers. When police closed the case on the 10th anniversary of his disappearance, Sukhova made her own appeal for information.

Last Monday, against all expectations except her own, her perseverance was rewarded when she was reunited with her son, now named Ruslan, following an improbable sequence of events that has shaken the Baltic republic of Latvia and provoked questions about the conduct of the police.

During a 1½hour meeting in a psychologist’s office, Sukhova and Ruslan discovered they had been going about their daily lives in the same district of the town of Daugavpils, oblivious to one another’s existence.

“The reunion went well,” said the local family judge, Ligita Strazda, who brought them together. “Afterwards Irina said although it could take months or even years for a bond to be reestablished, she is patient and prepared to wait.”

Sukhova’s ordeal began on a cold December day in 1992 when she left her six-week-old son at the door of the Ezerzeme supermarket. It was a common practice in those days: the Soviet era had only just come to an end, and the aisles were more cramped than they are today.

She returned to find that the pram had been taken and, although it was recovered a few weeks later in a block of flats, there was no trace of the boy.

In the economic chaos of the early 1990s, when Latvia was newly independent, Sukhova’s anguish attracted little media attention and she received no response to adverts in the local and national press.

Her husband turned to drink and the couple’s marriage disintegrated, but Sukhova continued her quest alone and hired a private detective.

In her last public appeal in 2002, when she had been searching for a decade, she said she had forgiven whoever had taken her son. “I hope that one day, they will tell me my son’s fate,” she said. “That is my only request. I will agree to any condition if they will just tell me what happened to my son.”

The breakthrough came last month when Strazda, the family judge, followed a gut instinct that a woman she had visited in jail was hiding something. The woman, whose family name is Zakarajeva, was in custody for a serious crime and it was decided her 16-year-old son would be removed from her care.

Zakarajeva confessed that Ruslan was not her biological child but claimed he had been brought by her late husband from the republic of Dagestan.

Strazda was suspicious and, remembering the case of the baby stolen 16 years earlier, she searched the internet and newspaper cuttings. Then she asked the police to find out whether the boy’s DNA matched Sukhova’s. They refused, so Strazda asked the local council to pay for a test and, on March 20, the results came back positive.

“When she was told that her son had been found, her entire face transformed. Suddenly she was alive and smiling again,” said Strazda.

As for the boy, he was “emotional but not as emotional as we expected”, said Helena Soldatyonoka, the councillor dealing with the case.

“This was partly because the last five years were difficult for him,” she added. The woman he had regarded as his mother had been widowed in 2003 and left destitute.

The boy now faces an unenviable choice: to return to the biological mother he never knew, or to remain in the extended family he was deceived into regarding as his own.

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