The Ethiopian Airlines plane crash that shook the entire world claimed lives of 149 passengers and eight crew members minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa. The plane crash also took lives of four Indian passengers. Reports surfacing say that one of the four Indian passengers, Shikha Garg made a long distance call to her father and also texted her husband before the crash.
The Ethiopian airlines flight ET 302 crashed at 11.08am, within six minutes of its take-off from Addis Ababa. Shikha texted her husband Soumya Bhattacharya before the crash, reported AFP. “I have boarded the flight and will call you once I land,” Garg texted to her husband. But before he could reply to her text, he received a phone call informing him about the crash. Shikha Garg got married in December last year to her colleague working with the United Nations in its environment programme UNEP. She got married to Soumya Bhattacharya after dating for three years. Bhattacharya had also bought a ticket to Nairobi but cancelled because of an urgent meeting. The couple, who lived in New Delhi, had instead planned a vacation after Garg’s return from Nairobi.
Shikha was a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) consultant with the ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MoEF) and was on her way to Nairobi to be a part of an annual conference at United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA). According to Hindustan Times, Shikha, just before the crash, called her father Satish Garg from Addis Ababa. Satish Garg runs a jewellery shop in Delhi’s Rohini. Satish told the leading daily that, “She was changing her flight…I checked the record. She had called me at exactly 10.06 am. She was fine and we spoke normally. She was changing her flight then. Hours later, my son read about the plane crash on the internet. I knew my daughter was on that flight.”
The other three Indian nationals that lost their lives in the plane crash were Vaidya Pannagesh Bhaskar, Vaidya Hansin Annagesh and Nukavarapu Manisha.
A Nairobi-bound Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa Sunday, killing all eight crew and 149 passengers on board, including four Indians, tourists, business travellers, and “at least a dozen” UN staff. Ethiopian Airlines said Kenya had the largest number of casualties with 32, followed by Canada with 18, Ethiopia nine, then Italy, China, and the US with eight each. Britain and France each had seven people on board, Egypt six, and Germany five. Twelve countries in Africa and 14 in Europe had citizens among the victims.
