Wednesday, 25 March 2015

Heartbreaking Stories Emerge As Germanwings Plane Crash Victims Identified

A day after a Germanwings jet plummeted from the sky and crashed in the French Alps en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, heartbreaking details emerged about the 150 people on board, all of whom are presumed dead.

Germanwings on Wednesday confirmed many of the passengers' nationalities -- including 72 Germans and 35 Spaniards -- but said it was still working to contact all the victims' relatives.

As officials began to confirm the passengers' identities, the many personal tragedies of flight 4U 9525 came into clearer focus. On board were opera singers and rock musicians, infants and grandparents, and people from at least 18 countries, from Iran to Israel.

Here are some of the crash victims:

Marina Bandres Lopez-Belio and her infant son, Julian, Britain

Marina Bandres Lopez-Belio, a 37-year-old film editor, wanted to get back home to England with her 7-month-old son as soon as possible after her uncle’s funeral in Spain. “She bought the tickets at the last moment,” her husband, Pawel Pracz, said in a statement. “We are devastated and would like to request that we be allowed to grieve in peace as a family without intrusion at this difficult time.”

The couple lived in Manchester, England, having met at film school in the city, according to local newspaper, Manchester Evening News. “They were always together and never on their own. It’s such a shame,” a former classmate told the paper. In 2014, the couple had their son Julian and also worked together on a short film called "Sophie’s Fortune."

The mayor of Lopez-Belio's hometown in the Spanish Pyrenees called the news "a terrible blow." Jaca Mayor Victor Barrio told the Manchester Evening News: "She came from an exceptional family who are going to suffer a lot with a terrible loss like this."





Eyal Baum, Israel

Israeli Eyal Baum, 39, was living in Barcelona working for the Mango fashion company. On Tuesday, he was headed to Germany for a short trip before joining his family in Israel for the Jewish festival of Passover, relatives told Israeli media.

"He was charming, a good soul, a smiling and friendly man -- really an angel," his sister Lital Baum-Betzalel told Israeli news site Walla. "I don't know where God was yesterday. I really don't know where he was."





Milad Hojatoleslami and Hussein Javadi, Iran

Sports reporters Milad Hojatoleslami and Hussein Javadi had traveled to Barcelona to cover a soccer match between Barcelona and Real Madrid. They were headed to Austria for an upcoming soccer match between Iran's and Chile’s national teams, according to Iran’s Tasnim news site, where Hojatoleslami worked.





Grandmother, mother and schoolgirl, Spain

The Spanish town of Sant Cugat, near Barcelona, faced the devastating loss of three generations from one family. The grandmother, mother and daughter have not been named. A member of the girl's school told The Associated Press: "The students are very affected. The teachers are trying to help them any way they can."

Two other residents of the town were on board the plane. They work for the town's Delphi company and were heading to a human resources conference, Spain's UGT union said.

sant cugat

Workers from the Delphi factory, who lost colleagues in the Germanwings flight crash, grieve after a minute of silence in Sant Cugat del Valles, near Barcelona, Spain, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)


Paul Andrew Bramley, Britain

Paul Andrew Bramley, 28, had just finished his first year studying hospitality and hotel management at a college in Switzerland, and was about to start an internship, according to the BBC.

First, he took a vacation in Spain with friends. On Tuesday, Bramley was headed home to England via Dusseldorf to see his mother Carol, the AP reported. "Paul was a kind, caring and loving son. He was the best son, he was my world," she said on Wednesday.





Here are some more details of the victims from the Associated Press:

Sixteen high-school students and two teachers, Germany

The students and their teachers were returning from an exchange program in Spain. Their names have not been released.

The group was from Haltern, a rural town 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Duesseldorf, where it seemed everyone knew someone who had died.

The principal of Joseph Koenig High School, Ulrich Wessel, called the loss of his students and two teachers -- one who had just married and another who was soon to be -- a "tragedy that renders one speechless."

"I was asked yesterday how many students there are at the high school in Haltern, and I said 1,283 without thinking. Then had to say afterward, unfortunately, 16 fewer since yesterday," he said. "That's just terrible."

haltern

Two young women comfort one another while looking at flowers and candles left by mourners at the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school on March 25, 2015, in Haltern, Germany. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)


Maria Radner, her husband and their baby, Germany

Maria Radner, a 34-year-old contralto from Duesseldorf, her husband and infant son were among the victims, Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu said.

The Spanish opera house said she played the goddess Erda in Richard Wagner's "Siegfried" last weekend.

maria radner

Maria Radner performs during a dress rehearsal for Richard Wagner's opera "Goetterdaemmerung" during the Salzburg Easter Festival in Austria, March 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson, file)


Oleg Bryjak, Germany

Bass baritone Oleg Bryjak, had performed along with Radner in the production of "Siegfried" at Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu, the opera house said. Bryjak, 54, had sung the part of Alberich.

Bryjak was born in Ukraine of Kazakhstani origin and had moved to Germany in 1991, where he was the soloist at the Deutsche Opera am Rhein in Duesseldorf. Its director, Christoph Meyer, said that "we have lost a great performer and a great person in Oleg Bryjak."

Christina Scheppelmann, artistic director of the Liceu, said: "The mood is ominous, like it should be in any kind of workplace facing a tragedy like this one."

oleg bryjak

Employees and trustees of the opera house Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Spain, observe a minute's silence in memory of the victims of the Germanwings plane crash Airbus on March 25, 2015. (David Ramos/Getty Images)


Asmae Ouahhoud el Allaoui and her husband, Spain

Ouahhoud el Allaoui, 23, got married on Saturday and was moving to Duesseldorf, according to the town hall of La Llagosta in northeastern Spain, where she was from. Her husband, an unnamed Moroccan, was also on the plane. The town hall said another man born there, Francisco Javier Gonalons, 42, also died in the crash.





Mireia Serrat, Spain

Serrat was export director for Spanish industrial manufacturer INOXPA, the Girona, Spain-based company said.

Maria Luisa Romanos, Spain

Romanos was the wife of INOXPA owner Candi Granes, the company said.

Carles Milla, Spain

Milla, a married 37-year-old, was going to a food technology fair in Cologne on behalf of Milla Masanas, a small food machinery company in the town of Cornella de Terri, north of Barcelona, the company's managing director said.

Martyn Matthews, Britain

Matthews, 50, was a senior quality manager from Wolverhampton. He is survived by his wife, Sharon, and his two children, the Foreign Office said. "We are devastated at the news of this tragic incident and request that we are allowed to deal with this terrible news without intrusion at this difficult time," the family said in a statement.





Carol and Greig Friday, Australia

Carol, a married mother of two, celebrated her 68th birthday on the eve of the crash, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said. She was vacationing with her son Greig, who was due to turn 30 next month and was to teach English in Europe. Bishop read out a statement from the family in which they said they were "in deep disbelief and crippled with sadness."





Yvonne and Emily Selke, U.S.

Yvonne Selke of Nokesville, Virginia, worked for Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. in Washington and performed work under contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's secretive satellite mapping office, according to a person close to the family. She was travelling with her grown daughter Emily -- a 2013 graduate of Drexel University in Philadelphia who worked for Carr Workplaces of Alexandria, Va. The U.S. State Department said a third American citizen was also on board the flight and that the victim's family had been notified. It did not release the name out of respect for the family.

emily selke

Television news cameras are lined up outside of the house where Germanwings A320 plane crash victim Yvonne Selke lived in Nokesville, Virginia, Wednesday, March 25, 2015. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)


selke

A photo of Emily Selke from LinkedIn.


Junichi Sato, Japan

Sato, one of two Japanese victims, was based in Duesseldorf where he worked for Japanese machinery maker Seika Corp.'s local branch. The company said Sato had been in Barcelona, Spain, for a business trip.

"I'm speechless. My heart is totally broken," Sato's father Yukio said in an interview with Nippon Television Network Corp. from Hokkaido, their hometown in northern Japan. "I'm so proud of my son -- he was working very hard as a businessman."

Gabriela Lujan Maumus and Sebastian Greco, Argentina

Maumus was 28 and played in a rock band called Asalto al Parque Zoologico, or Assault on the Zoo Park, according to local website infobae.com. The group released an album a few months ago and had a concert scheduled for March 29 in Buenos Aires, according to the band's Facebook page and Twitter account. Greco was a financial analyst, according to his LinkedIn profile. The couple was in Europe on vacation.





Juan Armando Pomo, Argentina

Pomo, 51, was a businessman who for more than 20 years had lived in Asuncion, Paraguay. He was married with two teenage children, according to Infobae.





Luis Eduardo Medrano, Colombia

Medrano, a 36-year-old architect, had been vacationing in Europe. His family expected him to return to his native city of Popayan after working several years for an engineering firm in Equatorial Guinea. Medrano's father told local newspaper El Tiempo that shortly before takeoff he received a brief text message from his son: "Flying to Germany."

Maria del Pilar Tejada, Colombia

Tejada, 33, was an economist doing doctoral work at Bonn University, according to Colombian newspaper El Tiempo.





Erbol Imankulov, Kazakhstan

Imankulov was director of a silicon plant in the eastern Kazakh city of Karaganda, according to state news agency Kazinform.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/25/germanwings-crash-victims_n_6939326.html?utm_hp_ref=travel&ir=Travel and provided by entertainment-movie-news.com
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