TWO newly wed couples and 24 people from the same town were among 63 Canadians who died in the Ukrainian Airlines crash in Iran.
In total 138 people heading to Canada were on board the Boeing 737-800, which fell to earth in a fireball after taking off from Tehran en route to Kiev, killing all 176 people on board.
Horrifying footage posted online shows the plane engulfed in flames as it went down.
The tragedy came just hours after Tehran fired missiles at two US bases in Iraq, sparking fears it could have been shot down by mistake by jittery Iranian air defences.
But Western intelligence agencies have now said that the plane had suffered a technical malfunction.
Arash Pourzarabi, 26, and Pouneh Gourji, 25, who were post-graduate students in computer science at the University of Alberta, had gone to Iran for their wedding, said Reza Akbari, president of the Iranian Heritage Society of Edmonton.
They were on the plane with four members of their wedding party and another 24 Iranian-Canadians from Edmonton, Akbari said.
"Oh God, I can’t believe this. It’s shocking to the whole community," he said.
Another couple, Siavash Ghafouri Azar and Sara Mamani, both engineers had also just married in Iran and had just bought a house in Montreal.
Alvand Sadeghi, 30, a talented pianist who played for guests at his 2018 wedding, had moved to Toronto last April to join his wife, said a family.
Both Sadeghi and his wife, Negar Borghei, were killed in the crash along with his sister and her daughter.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said 138 people on the plane were connecting to a flight to Canada.
"All had so much potential, so much life ahead of them," he said, adding Canada expected to have a role in the crash investigation.
Flags flew at half-mast across Canada, including at Parliament in Ottawa, and vigils were scheduled in several cities.
The flight was popular among Canada’s 210,000 Iranian community in the absence of direct links, and carried many students and academics heading home from the holidays.
University of Alberta President David Turpin said at least 10 members of the university community had died.
"This is a grave loss. Words simply cannot express the grief that we are feeling," he said.
Among the victims was Mojgan Daneshmand, a professor of electrical engineering who was "a brilliant, brilliant lady, very smart," Akbari said.
Her husband, Pedram Mousavi, a professor of mechanical engineering at the same college, and the couple's two daughters, also died in the crash.
Mousavi was "like a father," said student Hossein Saghlatoon.
"Everyone has been crying since last night. It's a huge loss and the void is not going to be filled by anyone or anything," he added.
Two school boards in the Toronto area said a number of students and their family members had been killed.
The disaster was the largest recent loss of life among Canadians since an Air India flight blew up in 1985 over the Atlantic Ocean, killing 268 Canadians.
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