Turkish-Montrealer coping with relative's death after Istanbul attack
Candice Sag was at Ataturk airport just one hour before massacre
Candice Sag was sitting at a restaurant in Iskenderun, Turkey, when her mother received a call from a family friend asking if she was okay.
It was only then Sag realized that if her flight leaving Istanbul had been delayed any longer, she might not have made it to the restaurant at all.
Sag, a 23 year-old Concordia student, was in Istanbul's Ataturk airport one hour before this week's gruesome attack.
It took another few hours for her to learn that her relative had not been so lucky. He was among the 44 people who were killed.
"I was just shocked," Sag said. "We couldn't sleep. We were all just together, sitting down as a family."
Grief in Iskenderun
Umut Sakaroğlu, a member of her extended family, had tried to stop one of the bombers, Sag told CBC's Daybreak.
A customs officer who had just earned his degree a year ago, Sakaroğlu shot one of the bombers, causing him to fall to the ground.
"He jumped on the bomber," Sag said. "And after he jumped on the bomber, the bomb exploded."
Sag said a sergeant called Sakaroğlu's immediate family to give them the news.
Family members, police officials and others in the community gathered for a funeral in Iskenderun on Thursday to mourn his death.
"It was very sad. There were pictures of him everywhere," said Sag.
There has been an outpouring of support for the airport employee, some calling him "a martyr." A Facebook page created in his honour this week is filled with condolence messages.
Travelling on
Sag travels to Turkey often to visit her family. She said this was the first time an attack hit so close to home.
"I know it's weird but it's like I feel safer [here in Iskenderun] than Istanbul," she said in a phone interview. Iskenderun is a coastal city near the Syrian border.
"All the attacks, right now, are there."
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Still, she said, she has confidence in the country's security forces and says she will continue her planned travels.
"I'll still keep my plans. I don't think it will be an issue," she said, after mentioning she intended to travel around the Black Sea.
Sag plans on returning back to her home in Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood in the fall to continue her studies in psychology at Concordia.
"We shouldn't look at ıt as 'there was an attack in Turkey,'" she said. "Rather, èthere was an attack done to other humans.'"