A beauty queen who was sold by gypsies after being kidnapped has been reunited with her family sixteen years after she disappeared.
Olga Romanovich, 20, was just four when she was taken from her mother and sold to gypsies for a pair of gold earrings.
Her mother moved to Moldova from Belarus after separating from her father and Olga – who was named Maria Preyda by the family that bought her – was abducted when her mother went to buy cigarettes.
It was in Moldova that Olga took part and won a beauty contest.
She was reunited with her birth family by Interpol who discovered that she had been sold in Soroki, near the border with Ukraine.
She told newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda: “I was loved in that gypsy family, they raised me as well as they could.
“Even more in fact, but that feeling comes when you realise that it’s not your life. You’re not one of them like everybody else. You’re different.”
