The impoverished Bangladeshi mother of conjoined twins separated last week in a complex operation in Australia says she is overjoyed at the news the twins are doing well, but doesn't want them back.
Lovely Mallick, 22, said she gave Trishna and Krishna up soon after their birth almost three years ago because there was no way she and her husband could care for the sickly newborns.
"I'm overjoyed with the news that my babies are in good condition," she told AFP by telephone from Khulna, some 135 kilometres (84 miles) southwest of the Bangladesh capital Dhaka.
"No mother in the world could be as proud as me. I always knew that they would get separated. I just knew everything would be okay in the end for my girls."
The twins, who turn three on December 22, were separated by a team of specialists who worked for 32 hours on Monday and Tuesday to divide their connected skulls, brains and blood vessels.
The procedure took two years of planning and preparatory operations. Both girls are now awake and in a stable but serious condition, and the surgery has been hailed a success.
Lovely and her husband Kartik Chandra Mallick, 30, who works in a jute mill, are both Hindus and Krishna was named after the Hindu god. Trishna got her name because it rhymed with her sister's.
The couple do not have any other children.
"I didn't want to abandon my children, no matter how unusual they were, but considering our financial condition I knew that giving them up was the best thing for the girls."
She said she is in awe at what the girls' guardian in Australia, Moira Kelly, has done.
"My babies are now in good condition. I pray that they will be fully cured soon and lead normal lives. They will be educated and smart," she said.
"She (Kelly) has done the greatest thing for my babies. I'm just their biological mother, but I could not do anything for them. She did everything a mother does for her babies. She has done something more than a mother."
