PARIS, July 9: Surgeons who fought for hours to separate Siamese twins Ladan and Laleh Bijani came across an unexpected “trap” of large pockets of blood that unleashed an unstoppable haemorrhage, a French doctor who helped prepare the operation said Wednesday.

“We prepared for everything, but in the end, there was a ‘trap’, at the base of the cranium, which was not detected by the pre-operational (3D) scans and where the haemorrhage occurred,” Pierre Lasjaunias, a professor of neurology and radiology at Paris’s Kremlin-Bicetre hospital, told AFP.

Located between the base of the skull and the meninges — the protective lining of the brain — the “trap” was “like pockets of blood, exceptionally large blood sacs, which had no known purpose but were not the cause of any disorder.”

He added: “At the end of the operation, just at the point when the twins were being separated, these pockets were opened up but, for reasons that are still unclear, it was impossible to stem the haemorrhage,” he said.

Lasjaunias was speaking in Paris after rushing back from Singapore for duties at the hospital. The 29-year-old Bijani twins died on Tuesday after surgeons in Singapore battled for 52 hours to separate them at the head, one of the riskiest endeavours in a branch of surgery where the success rate is always tragically low.

Lasjaunias, asked about the ethical questions stirred by the operation, said that medically “there was no degree of urgency about having to operate, unless it was the pressure exerted by the sisters themselves.”

He added: “An ethics committee, which notably included a cleric, a Muslim like the two girls, was set up in Singapore when plans for the operation got underway. It determined that their desire for separation was valid and the medical risks acceptable.”—AFP