QUITO, Ecuador (AP):

A chance meeting has reunited identical twin sisters who were separated at birth nearly 15 years ago and touched off a legal dispute over how two doctors adopted one of the girls.

Petita Penaherrera says she did not know she had twins until she and her daughter Andrea came face-to-face with Marielisa Romo four months ago in the southern Ecuadorean town of Milagros meaning "miracles" in English.

Andrea and Marielisa shared the same dark eyes, the same hair, the same ... everything.

Marielisa was accompanied by Roberto Romo and Isabel Garcia, the doctor couple who had delivered the twin babies and then raised one.

Investigations began and, in June, Penaherrera and her husband Augusto Freire filed a suit against the doctors saying they never mentioned Andrea's twin.

"We never found out about the existence of that girl," Freire said Thursday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "After seeing a girl in the restaurant who was exactly like mine I almost fainted."

He recalled the ensuing conversation: "We asked 'Who's her father?' And the father is Dr. Romo, who was the doctor who performed the Caesarean on my wife."

Romo and Garcia could not be reached for comment but told Ecuavisa television that the biological mother knew about the twins but only wanted to keep one of them.

Cried

"The nurse said out loud, 'Congratulations you have two girls"' Garcia told Ecuavisa. "The woman, like every adolescent who is not ready for motherhood, just cried and cried."

"I gave it appropriate time to see if the mother would show up or would feel touched," Romo said. But the couple said there was no written agreement.

Penaherrera insists that she was never told. "They stole her from me, the doctors stole my daughter," she said in an interview with Ecuavisa.

Meanwhile, Penaherrera and Freire are trying to unite the twin girls.