CTV News has confirmed an Edmonton woman and her daughter, as well as a Calgary man, are among the 157 people who died when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed Sunday.
Mohamed Hassan Ali says his sister, Amina Ibrahim Odowaa, and five-year-old niece, Sofia Faisal Abdulkadir, were on the connecting flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Nairobi, Kenya.
The mother and daughter had flown from Edmonton to Toronto on Friday.
Odowaa’s brother, a Toronto resident, said he had originally hoped she wasn’t on the plane.
“Maybe she missed it, and then she’s stuck at the airport waiting, and hopefully she’s not on board,” Hassan Ali remembered thinking.
He said finding out otherwise has been very hard on their family.
“It’s such a tragic thing. So unexpected.”
A third Alberta resident has been identified as a victim of the wreck: Derick Lwugi.
Lwugi was a former president of Calgary’s Kenyan Community Association and a City of Calgary accountant. He and his wife, Gladys Kivia, have three children.
It is unknown what caused the plane to go down.
The Boeing 737-Max 8 is said to have crashed six minutes after taking off from Ethiopia’s capital at 8:38 a.m. local time.
The captain had more than 8,000 hours of flying time to the flight. Minutes after takeoff, the pilot radioed he was struggling with the jet and wanted to return to the airport. The plane soon lost radar contact.
“He only got to little over a thousand feet and we don't really know if he flew into rising terrain or what actually happened. We do know that the vertical speed was fluctuating quite a bit,” Aviation Safety Consultant Keith Mackey told CTV News.
All 157 people, from 35 different nations, on board died. Eighteen passengers were from Canada. Only a few of the Canadian victims have been identified.
Months ago, the same model Boeing plane was involved in a crash off the coast of Indonesia, killing all on board.
Air Canada and West Jet both have the aircraft in their fleets.
With files from The Canadian Press
