Pakistani woman among victims of US air crash

WASHINGTON: A Pakistani woman, Asra Hussain Raza, was among the passengers killed in a tragic mid-air collision between a passenger plane and a military helicopter in the United States.

Asra was aboard American Airlines Flight 5342, which was struck by a US military Black Hawk training helicopter mid-air.

Asra sent a text to her husband, Hamaad Raza, from the doomed flight as they approached Washington, saying she would land in about 20 minutes.

Hamaad, who was waiting at the airport for her arrival, never received another message, his father, Hashim Raza, said.

“Asra was everything to us,” Hashim, holding back tears with a quavering voice, said in a telephone interview as he traveled from Missouri to Washington to meet his son. “And now my son is a widower at 25. What do I say to him? They planned to have children, they were so much looking forward to that.”

The couple met at Indiana University Bloomington, where she studied corporate finance and was a straight-A student.

Hashim said when his son first met Asra, he declared: “I’m going to marry her.”

Asra later earned her master’s degree in public health from Columbia University and got a job with a consulting group in Washington, with the ultimate goal of working for the government to improve public health, her father-in-law said.

“All she wanted to do was help people, and DC, she thought, was the place to achieve her goals,” Hashim said. “And she was such a great cook — Indian, Italian, Chinese food. I told her to open a restaurant.”

She traveled to Wichita about once or twice a month to help turn around a hospital, he said.

“She was an extremely caring person,” he said. “She’d call just to say, ‘I love you.’” She had travelled to Wichita, Kansas, for work-related matters and was on her way back when the unfortunate incident occurred.

Raza, who lost his wife in the crash, resides in the state of Missouri, USA. According to a close family friend, Hamaad and Asra had been married for two years. Asra was 26 years old, while Hamaad is 25. Both were graduates of Indiana University. Hamaad currently works as an accountant at Ernst & Young, and he mentioned that his wife never considered air travel to be a comfortable experience.

Raza’s father, Dr Hashim Raza, is originally from Karachi, Pakistan. A graduate of Dow University, Dr Raza is regarded as one of Missouri’s most distinguished doctors and is currently serving at the Missouri Baptist Medical Center.