A Canadian man who lost his young daughter and wife in the Iran plane crash posted a sweet tribute to his little girl playing the piano.
The clip, reposted on Twitter by Iran News Wire, features 9-year-old Reera Esmaeilion showing off her musical talent at a recital.
Reera and her mom, Parisa Eghbalian, who lived in Richmond Hill, Ontario, were among the 176 people killed on the Ukrainian International Airlines flight that US officials believe was mistakenly shot down by an Iranian missile on Wednesday.
Reera’s father, Hamed Esmaeilion, recalled the heartbreaking phone call he had to make to his daughter’s school.
“I usually call when she’s absent, usually she’s not,” he told Canada’s CBC News. “I told them that Reera will be absent forever.”
Esmaeilion and Eghbalian met in college in Iran before moving to Canada in 2010, when Reera was 6 months old, the outlet said. The couple shared a dental practice in Aurora.
He said his daughter was also a gifted athlete who played soccer and spoke three languages, English, French and Farsi, on top of keeping up with her piano lessons.
“I had to force her to play piano every day. ‘Reera, you have to play 30 minutes,'” he recalled telling her. “‘No, Dad, it’s 25 minutes,’ she would respond, because she had Googled that 9-year-olds are supposed to practice for 25 minutes.”
“Very hard to recall all those memories,” the father added.
Esmaeilion was headed to Iran to identify his loved ones’ remains.
