Opinion: Almost immediately, Iranian officials claimed the crash was caused by the pilots losing control of the plane after a fire struck one of its engines. But in the smouldering remains, unanswe…
They were brilliant graduate students and accomplished professors, loving parents and excited children, two newlywed couples who had just been married — 63 Canadians on their way home after spending their winter break in Iran.
After an hour delay, they took off in the pre-dawn darkness from Tehran’s international airport at 6:12 a.m. But just three minutes into the four-hour flight, at 2,400 metres and without a mayday from the cockpit, the Boeing 737-800 suddenly disappeared from radar.In the burning wreckage discovered near a soccer field northwest of Tehran, there was no sign of survivors.
The airline issued a statement denying pilot error was at fault: “Given the crew’s experience, error probability is minimal. We do not even consider such a chance.” The timing certainly seemed coincidental: Just hours earlier, Iran had launched a barrage of missiles at two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops in retaliation for last week’s American strike that killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
As shock and grief resonated across Canada, the focus was not on the cause of the crash but on the innocent lives lost. So many of the victims were brilliant members of the country’s academic community — and universities across the country spent the day announcing that they, too, had lost students and faculty in the tragedy.
Fareed Arasteh, a PhD student in biology at Ottawa’s Carleton University was also on his way home after marrying his fiancee in Iran just three days before. His bride couldn’t make the doomed flight and now she’s been left behind to grieve the life they will never have.University of Guelph PhD student Ghanimat Azdahri had spent the December break visiting her family and traditional Indigenous territories in Iran.
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Smouldering debris, body bags, a blackened soccer field: A snapshot of the plane crash that killed 167 people and shocked CanadaIt is one of the largest losses of Canadian lives since a bomb destroyed an Air-India flight from Montreal high over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all aboard, including 268 Canadian citizens
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