West Vancouver woman and former UBC student are among the Iranian plane crash victims
Credit to Author: Denise Ryan| Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:09:18 +0000
Farah Ghanei of West Vancouver says she has been in shock since learning her friend Soheila was one of 63 Canadians who perished on Wednesday in the crash of a Ukrainian airliner near Tehran.
Soheila Massoumeh Moshref Razavi Moghaddam was one of two additional people with Metro Vancouver connections who were identified as victims on Thursday. The other was a UBC researcher, Mehran Abtahi.
“Soheila was a beautiful person, a shining person, cheerful, hardworking, kind. It is a very big loss to her family, and she was like a sister to me.”
Soheila was 55, a mother of three children, Hanieh Kamelian, 34, Amir Kamelian, 30 and Kimia, 25.
Soheila’s father had recently died in Iran, and she had travelled to Mashad, Iran, with Hanieh and Amir for the memorial service. She had chosen to return early in order to get back to work at the front desk of the North Vancouver Travelodge, and ended up on the doomed flight.
“Her husband lived in Iran and they had a beautiful big house in West Vancouver,” said Ghanei. “She didn’t have to work, she just loved to be around people,” said Ghanei.
Ghanei met Soheila about 15 years ago, when Ghanei was running an immigration business. “Soheila had knowledge of accounting and she was very good with people and she spoke excellent English and Farsi,” said Ghanei.
She worked with Ghanei for about two years before leaving to focus on other things, but the women remained friends.
“She had a lovely, huge dog named Babashah that she took such good care of,” said Ghanei. “She bought that dog organic food and was always taking it on on long walks.”
The dog is with Kimia, said Ghanei. “I don’t know how the children are going to deal with the loss,” she said.
Ghanei said she believes the family will take Soheila’s body to Mashad to be buried next to her father.
Mehran Abtahi.
On Thursday, UBC President Santa J. Ono also confirmed the death of Mehran Abtahi, a post-doctoral research fellow in the civil engineering department.
Abtahi, who came from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, according to his Facebook page, had not been with the school long. He joined UBC in October, after earning his PhD at the University of Twente in The Netherlands in 2018. His thesis was on ways to eliminate micropollutants from conventionally-treated municipal waste water.
Two months later, Abtahi hosted a TEDx talk on nanofiltration membranes at the University of Helsinki, and went on to publish his findings in the Journal of Membrane Science, a relatively novel field of study in which he was blazing a trail.
“Being one of the pioneers in this newly born field, the research was quite demanding,” Mehran said in a 2018 interview. “I enjoyed finally presenting my findings at conferences all over the world, for example in Singapore, Vienna and San Francisco. The massive response from fellow-researchers to this innovative approach was heartwarming.’
Abtahi explained how he came by this particular research interest.
“The inspiration came from the situation in my home country of Iran,” he said. “Water shortage is becoming a serious environmental concern in many areas in Iran. Development of advanced water reuse strategies and technologies is inevitable in Iran.
At the time, Abtahi said he hoped to find a job in academics rather than industry, which led him to UBC’s civil engineering department, where he had only just begun. Colleagues contacted by Postmedia were reluctant to comment on working with him, however, as they had only met him once or twice.
Abtahi had also recently got married — the most recent public post on his spouse’s Facebook page is a May 2016 engagement announcement. It appears that his wife did not accompany her husband to Vancouver, but instead remained in Isfahan, where she works as a medical doctor.