Sara Saadat was 23 years old and had one as a PhD student at a small private university in San Diego, California. In the early hours of Wednesday, he took a flight from the Ukrainian state company from Tehran with his sister Saba and his mother Shekoufeh Choupannejad, both installed in Canada.
They had traveled to Iran to visit the family, but they never returned : missiles fired by the military forces of that country "by mistake," according to Iranian authorities and other nations, reached the aircraft shortly after its takeoff and caused its demolition, There is the death of all 176 people on board.
Hours earlier, Tehran had launched rockets at military targets used by Americans in neighboring Iraq. It was a response to the assassination ordered by Washington of the powerful Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.
A statement from Alliant International University of San Diego confirmed the death of student Sara Saadat.
"We address our deepest condolences to family and friends of the Alliant student Sara Saadat," reads the note, published on Facebook. “She was a passenger on PS752 flight from Ukraine International Airlines that crashed in Iran. It seems that he was visiting his family, ”the text continues,“ and he was returning to San Diego to begin our spring 2020 period in our PhD program in Clinical Psychology . ”
University officials said Friday that Saadat faculty members were too affected to give details about his life, but that the school will organize a memorial service, according to the San Diego Union Tribune .
His sister Saba, 21, lived in Edmonton, Canada, and studied biology at the University of Alberta, according to local media. The mother of both was a doctor installed in the same Canadian town. The youngest of the two girls planned to start a medical school after finishing her undergraduate.
In the same plane where she lost her life, several other Edmonton residents were traveling, many of them of Iranian origin .
In total, there were 57 Canadian citizens on board who planned to connect to Toronto, after traveling to Iran on their winter vacations, according to the authorities of that country. Among the victims, there were complete families, students and even two newly married couples, as reported by the Los Angeles Times . Initially, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had spoken of 63 deceased nationals.
The Revolutionary Guard of Iran acknowledged on Saturday that it accidentally shot down the plane by confusing it with a cruise missile. Previously, he denied this circumstance for several days, blaming the cause for a technical failure. The demolition version had instead been indicated as plausible by top representatives of Canada, Ukraine and the United States, among others.
"Missiles fired by a human error caused the horrible accident of the Ukrainian plane and the death of 176 innocent people ," said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Twitter, who described what happened as "great tragedy" and "unforgivable error." Rohaní also asked Apologies for the accident to his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelenski.
The acknowledgment of responsibility raises a series of questions, such as who authorized the attack on the plane and why Iran did not close its international airport or airspace when preparing to retaliate against the United States (which happened a few hours earlier), consider The Associated Press .
Hundreds of Iranians demonstrated this Saturday in Tehran with strong slogans against the Islamic system and the Revolutionary Guard for the demolition of the plane, reports the EFE agency.
The country is experiencing a period of strong tensions with the United States, a climate that worsened particularly in the last two weeks with hostile episodes that have led the two countries to be on the verge of a military conflict , before both sides lowered their tone. . The situation remains unstable anyway and its evolution hardly predictable.
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