Orphanage volunteer knew twins were fighters 

Source: ONE NewsOne of the conjoined twins

The young Australian woman who found conjoined twins Krishna and Trishna in a Bangladeshi orphanage says she always knew they were fighters and cried when she heard they had been separated.

Danielle Noble was working for the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development in Dhaka and volunteering on weekends at an orphanage when she came across the twins in January 2007, when they were only a month old.

Noble took the first steps to get the girls to Melbourne which led ultimately to their separation in a marathon surgical procedure, but she says she's just one of many people who helped them.

She confessed to crying while watching TV news coverage of the 31-hour operation at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital on Tuesday.

"I watched as the doctor came out and said they had been separated - it was quite surreal, unbelievable," Noble says.

"I shed a few tears - it's been really emotional.

"I feel connected to the girls, so it's been an emotional couple of days."

Noble says she knew from the moment she met the twins that they were fighters.

"I might be idealistic, but I had this feeling that this was going to work, that this would be a positive outcome," she says.

"In those days at the orphanage, no one would have given them more than a one or two per cent chance of surviving - the whole way through this they have fought against the odds."

The Sydney woman tried to play down the importance of her part in the two-year-old sisters' separation.

"I am just one person in a long chain of people," she says.

"This would not have happened with just one single individual - it was a combination of so many people who worked hard to achieve this outcome."

Noble says she was overwhelmed when she first saw the twins in the orphanage.

"I'd never seen conjoined twins before - it was overwhelming," she says.

She says she contacted hospitals in Australia to see if they could help, but because of the lack of medical equipment in Bangladesh there was no way of knowing if the twins, joined at their heads, could be successfully separated.

"There were so many obstacles between them and Australia," she says.

After raising money among Australian expats in Dhaka, she found Atom Rahman, an Australian-Bangladeshi who was a representative of the Children First Foundation (CFF) and is now the girls' co-guardian along with CFF founder Moira Kelly.

He put her in touch with Ms Kelly "and straight away they wanted to help".

"She was the final piece of the puzzle, and everything just fell into place," Ms Noble says.

Noble now works for the United Nations in Bangkok but is back in Australia for a holiday and is hoping to travel from Queensland to visit the twins on the weekend.