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Updated: Mar 12, 2019 12:32 IST

A little less than an hour before an Ethiopian airlines flight carrying 149 passengers and eight crew members crashed near Addis Ababa, one of the four Indian passengers made a long distance call to her father in Delhi’s Rohini.

Shikha Garg,32, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) consultant with the ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MoEF), dialled her father, Satish Garg, from Addis Ababa. “She was changing her flight...I checked the record. She had called me at exactly 10.06 am,” Satish said over phone.

On its way to Kenya’s Nairobi, the Ethiopian airlines flight ET 302 crashed at 11.08am, within six minutes of its take-off from Addis Ababa.

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“She was fine and we spoke normally. She was changing her flight then. Hours later, my son read about the plane crash on the internet. I knew my daughter was on that flight,” her father, who runs a jewellery shop in Rohini, said.

A graduate from Delhi University’s Shri Guru Teg Bahadur Khalsa College, Garg married her colleague, Soumya, also posted with the MoEF, on December 14.

Shikha was earlier a senior research fellow at the Indian Meteorological Institute. The second of three daughters, she had studied in a private school in Rohini.

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According to Garg’s profile on social media, she completed her Master in Science from TERI School of Advanced Studies and briefly worked for an engineering firm until December 2010.

Her profile says she was a technical expert (International Cooperation) at UNDP.

Family members said she was to return home on March 15. “My daughter was a brilliant student and had worked in the private sector before joining the Indian Meteorological Department. Later, she joined the MoEF,” her father said.

Late on Monday evening, the Garg family said it was yet to hear updates from the Ministry of External Affairs.

“The MEA got in touch with us and said they would contact us. After our conversation in the evening, we are still waiting for their call. We are still in the dark and are depending on news channels.”