A 15-year-old boy is under ‘house arrest’ as the suspected father of a schoolgirl’s unborn baby after she sensationally claimed she was impregnated by a 10-year-old.
The case received worldwide attention even though a doctor who examined the 10-year-old, named Ivan (Vanya), said he was too sexually immature to be a father.
The girl - Darya (Dasha) - had claimed on prime-time Russian national TV last month that only Ivan could have made her pregnant when she was 13.
It has now emerged that a 15-year-old boy is suspected of being the father after Russian police became involved in the case.
Darya’s family has made a statement to police involving the older boy, said the pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, citing its own sources.
The 15-year-old was identified as Stepan, but the paper acknowledged this was not his real name.
He was reported to be under house arrest in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia.
The age of consent in Russia is 16.
Neither the police nor Russia’s Investigative Committee have commented on the report which has been widely reported in the country.
Since the case broke, the girl - now 14 - has gone on to secure popularity as a would-be “influencer” on Instagram, where she has 89,000 flowers, and TikTok.
She tagged her posts with the words ‘Pregnant at 13’.
The girl’s mother Elena - reported to be terminally with cancer - had said of the pregnancy that she now had a “reason to live”.
At first she thought her daughter had gone down with food poisoning before realising she was carrying a child, she said.
Darya told viewers: "It was Vanya's idea [to have sex].
“But I did not mind.
“He closed the door leaving the key in the lock, so his mum could not open the door.
“It was scary a bit, that it would be painful.
“It was just a little - and then everything was normal.
“It was a bit shameful, we were just hiding under the blanket.
“I did not think that aged 10 he can do such things... I thought that nothing would happen.”
Dr Evgeny Grekov, a urology and andrology expert, who examined Ivan told TV viewers in a show called ‘Father at 10!?’ : “We rechecked the laboratory results three times so there cannot be any mistake.”
“He is still a child.”
A male neighbour in in Zheleznogorsk, a nuclear production city, said: “Obviously, someone else did this. They just want to hang it on the boy now.”
The 10-year-old boy was asked if the child could be someone else’s.
He said: “This cannot be.”
The boy’s mother Galina is convinced he is telling the truth.
“I believe to my son. That he is the father. I understand that he himself maybe doesn't realise what happened," she said.