Husband Left Behind Due to Mix-Up as Wife Boards Doomed Flight

Mohsen Ahmadipour and his wife, Roja Azadian, were traveling home to Ottawa after visiting their families in Iran when Ahmadipour found out his ticket was no longer good. He thought he had only canceled a portion of it, but due to some sort of mix-up, the whole ticket ended up invalid; as a result, Azadian got on the plane alone, with her husband telling her he'd find another flight. He never saw her again: Azadian, 43, had boarded the doomed Ukrainian International Airline Flight 752, which crashed within minutes of taking off Tuesday. A horrified Ahmadipour found out about the crash while still in the terminal, the Ottawa Citizen reports.

All 176 people aboard the plane, including 63 Canadians, were killed; the flight was headed to Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, but as the CBC reports, there have been no direct flights between Iran and Canada since Canada broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 2012. "Why [do] Canadians have to go through Ukraine to come to Canada? Why didn't we have a direct flight from Iran?" wonders one Toronto man with family in Tehran, whose friend was also killed on the flight. "I even joked about that she was a cheap person and she was looking for cheap flights, and we laughed about it. Now that's not a joke anymore." The news comes as a US official tells CNN it was indeed two Russian-made surface to air (SA-15) missiles that shot down the plane, and that the US saw Iranian radar signals lock onto the plane before it went down. (The current thinking is Iran shot the plane down mistakenly.)