A chilling message has emerged from a passenger of the ill-fated Ukrainian plane that crashed in Iran on Wednesday.
Along with nine crew members, 167 passengers died when the Boeing 737-800 aircraft destined for Kiev crashed into a field outside of Tehran.
Among those listed by Ukraine International Airlines as on the flight was Mojtaba Abbasnezhad, whose Linkedin page says he was a teaching assistant and PhD student at the University of Toronto.
A Twitter account under the username sorush_ab uses the same image as the Linkedin and also boasts "Phd student at University of Toronto" in the account's biography. The New York Times' Farnaz Fassihi and Saudi television channel Al Arabiya report the account belonged to Abbasnezhad, despite not including his name.
One tweet, that has since gone viral with more than 23,000 likes, was posted by the account at 12:35pm on Wednesday (NZ time), roughly four hours before the plane crash and as Iran launched rocket strikes against Iraq military bases housing United States troops.
Written in Persian, the tweet, when translated by Fassihi, the Times' "Mideast & Iran expert", says: "I predicted before my flight there will be war. If I die, forgive me."
Al Arabiya says the tweet said: "I had predicted there would be war just before my flight. Forgive me if you've seen any good or bad [in me]."
Despite the slightly different wording, both translations note Abbasnezhad asking for forgiveness just before his plane went down in flames.
Other less reliable translators, including Google, bring up the tweet as saying: "I had predicted my flight would go to war. Mr. Good, you saw bad solvent."
Abbasnezhad sent two more tweets before going silent, with one asking if there had been any casualties from the Iranian attacks.
Two black boxes which could help in the investigation are currently being examined by Iran. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for the "truth" to be established and said he was determined to find who was "responsible for this terrible catastrophe".
