A Canadian woman aboard the doomed Ukrainian airliner had a premonition about the imminent disaster, calling her husband for assurance before she and 175 other people aboard lost their lives.
Sheyda Shadkhoo was heading back home after taking a three-week vacation to visit her mother and sisters in Tehran, where she boarded the Boeing 737 for a connecting flight to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, according to CNN.
“I spoke to her . . . 20 minutes before the plane took off,” Hassan Shadkhoo told CNN’s news partner CBC on Wednesday night in Toronto.
Shadkoo said she was worried about the rising tensions between Tehran and Washington after President Trump ordered the drone-strike killing of a top Iranian general last week.
“She wanted me to assure her that there wasn’t going to be a war. I told her not to worry. ‘Nothing’s gonna happen,’ ” Hassan said.
“She said, ‘OK. They’re telling me to turn off my phone. Goodbye.’ That was it.”
Minutes later, the airliner crashed, leaving no survivors.
Shadkhoo was one of 63 Canadians to be killed when the plane was downed by what officials now say was an Iranian missile, possibly fired by mistake, on the night Tehran launched an airstrike on US bases in Iraq.
Also, 82 Iranians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, four Afghans, three Germans and three British citizens were identified as victims.
Instagram feeds for two of the flight attendants on board — Valeriia Ovcharuk, 28, and Mariia Mykytiuk, 24 — were flooded with touching notes in the wake of the crash.
Ovcharuk’s page is filled with photos from her travels around the world.
“I owe my love to New York,” she wrote in Russian alongside a photo of her in front of the Radio City Music Hall last month. “ This is an incredible city!”
Her last update, a photo of her lounging in a hotel pool in Thailand, was a tribute to her job.
“Work, I love you,” read her caption.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B6VuBhfp0Ii/
Also among the dead were newlyweds Saeed Tahmasebi Khademsadi, 35, and his wife, Niloofar Ebrahim, who were returning home to the United Kingdom from their wedding in Iran, Ebrahim’s home country, according to reports.
“They were a wonderful, beautiful couple and they were so happy together,” the groom’s sister, Sally, 41, told The Telegraph through tears.
Additional reporting by Vincent Barone