In 1986, on a northern Swedish ski slope, a boy came up to Richard Hedström.
“Suddenly a guy arrives who says, ‘hello Magnus’," Richard told SBS News.
“The guy continues to repeat this a few times and I didn’t understand anything.”
Then aged eight years old, Richard went to his parents and told them of the strange encounter.
Fredrik, the other boy, complained that his friend Magnus had pretended not to know him.
Fredrik’s family peered over toward Richard before coming over to apologise – their son had mistaken Richard for his friend Magnus, who lived in the south of Sweden.
The families had dinner together and became friends, and the next year the Hedströms drove more than nine hours south to Enköping for summer.
It was there that Richard Hedström was finally introduced to Magnus Lind, the boy he had been mistaken for on the ski-fields.
The two nine-year-olds were shy at first, but gradually warmed to each other.
When they stood in front of a mirror they understood why Fredrik was confused.
“We both looked in in the mirror and said, yeah, we have the same eyes – maybe the same nose,” Magnus told SBS News.
“I thought we were very similar, but didn’t think he was a twin, rather a doppelganger,” Richard said.
Both Magnus and Richard had been adopted from Lebanon when they were just a few months old and neither knew anything about their biological parents.
The paperwork was rough – their listed birthdates were a month apart.
But since the day they met, the pair have been best friends with Richard traveling south in the warmer months and Magnus traveling north for ski trips in the winter.
For both Richard and Magnus, their striking similarity was just a curiosity. They were friends, and that was far more important.
“We have just been like, the best friends you can have,” Magnus said.
“When you’re a kid, you’re just playing around. You don’t have time for thinking about a DNA test.”
But after 14 years of people mistaking them, insisting that they must be related, doubting their claims to be ‘just friends’, the pair got a DNA test in the year 2000.
The result was conclusive. They were twins.
“We were friends the whole time, so when we got the result we didn’t do that much,” Magnus said, bemused at the thought they would be shocked.
“It wasn’t like we were jumping around, or making a toast with champagne or something – it was just like, ‘yeah okay’.”
“We are quite easy going, both of us.”
But the news had a more profound effect on Richard’s mother, who began crying.
“If she knew this from the beginning, she would have taken both of us – she was crying because it’s unfair that they just split twins this way,” Magnus said.
But despite knowing they are related, until now the pair haven’t made a serious effort to locate relatives in Lebanon.
“We haven’t made a search for them, we think we have very good families in Sweden, both of us,” Magnus said.
But Richard says the pair aren’t getting any younger, and he wants to find their parents, and to explain that there’s no bitterness at all.
“For us it would be the final piece in our otherwise lovely life,” he said.
“We guess it was about the war, which was then, or poverty could be a cause.”
Other people who have tried to locate their own families in Lebanon have been met with difficulty – with limited records it can be a challenge.
Magnus and Richard don’t have their biological parents’ names or an exact birthdate, but they say there can’t be that many twins born in 1978.
The pair’s similarities go beyond looks – Magnus is a security guard and Richard is a police officer – and they say their friendship hasn’t changed much since finding out the truth.
“We didn’t think that it was so important to do a DNA test, because we were best friends anyway,” Magnus said.
“It has always been like this, from the first time when we were nine years old.”
Children of the Cedars, a support group based in The Netherlands for Lebanese adoptees, seeks to provide assistance, attempting to reunite brothers and sisters, parents and children.
