All four men were sports journalists from Iran. They had just arrived in Europe for the first time to cover a number of sporting events, including Sunday’s clásico between Real Madrid and Barcelona.
A last-minute change of plan, however, meant that only two of them, Milad Hojjatoleslami and Hossein Javadi, were on board the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday.
The other two, Payam Younesipour and Saeed Zahedian, feel extremely lucky to have narrowly escaped death. “Since yesterday, I’m only asking myself what happened,” Younesipour told the Guardian over the phone from Vienna. “We could have been dead by now. God saved us.”
Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed on Wednesday that Hojjatoleslami and Javadi were on board the Airbus A320 that crashed en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. The country’s president, Hassan Rouhani, offered his condolences.
Hojjatoleslami was working for the semi-official Tasnim news agency and Javadi was a sports journalist with the Vatan-e-Emrooz newspaper, Iranian media reported.
Younesipour told the Guardian that all four men had decided to come to Europe at their own expense to cover a number of football matches including the Iranian national team’s upcoming games against Chile in Austria on Thursday and against Sweden in Stockholm next week.
The group had initially planned to travel to Barcelona together for Sunday’s match but Younesipour and Zahedian decided not to go. “If we’d gone to Barcelona, we would all have returned together,” Younesipour said. “We decided to stay in Vienna and focus on the national team’s trainings before the coming matches.”
Younesipour, who had known the victims for a long time and had travelled with them in the past for similar events, said his friends could have survived if they had not had to travel on low-cost flights.
“The fact is that they couldn’t afford other flights because we’ve all volunteered to cover these events with our own money,” he said. “The Iranian media organisations that we work for don’t support us financially.”