The father of United Nations worker Joanna Toole paid tribute to his daughter saying ‘nobody had a bad word to say about her’.
Joanna, 36, was the first named British victim of the Ethiopian Airlines flight which crashed six minutes after take-off for Kenya from Addis Ababa yesterday morning, killing all 157 people on board.
She was travelling alone on the Ethiopian Airlines flight for her work with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Joanna, from Exmouth, Devon, was one of at least 12 passengers who were travelling to Nairobi for a UN environment gathering.
Her father, Adrian Toole, said he was ‘proud’ of his daughter who was a ‘wonderful human being’.
She ‘had such a warm touch, you’d not find anybody say a bad word against her’, he said.
‘Everybody was very proud of her and the work she did, we’re still in a state of shock,’ Mr Toole told Devon Live.
He added: ‘She was as warm and as good with people as she was with animals.’ His daughter had been a ‘passionate animal campaigner’ throughout her life, advocating for the rights of badgers at the age of eight in her hometown of Exmouth, Mr Toole said.
One of her most recent projects – trying to stop marine animals becoming entangled in fishing nets – had been accepted as a UN official programme, something that would now become her legacy, her father said.
Mr Toole said his daughter had only just settled down in Rome after she and her partner had managed to get jobs at the UN after much hard work.
He said: ‘Joanna’s work was not a job – it was her vocation.
She never really wanted to do anything else but work in animal welfare since she was a child. ‘Somehow that work took her into the international sphere and for the last 15 years she has been working for international animal welfare organizations.
‘That involves a lot of traveling around the world – although personally I never wanted her to be on a single one of those planes. ‘I’m an environmental campaigner myself, so partly it was because of the damage to the environment but also because it’s a dangerous occupation to be flying. ‘Up until now she had been lucky.
Victim Michael Ryan, from Ireland, pictured working as an engineer for the WFP at the Kutupalong camp for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (Picture: PA) ‘Joanna was a very soft and loving person.
Everybody was very proud of her and the work she did. We’re still in a state of shock. ‘Joanna was genuinely one of those people who you never heard a bad word about. She was one of those people who burned the candle at both ends.
‘She never had any doubt that she wanted to work in animal welfare and on the international scene, that meant a lot of travel. It’s hard to imagine life without her.’
Manuel Barange, the director of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN fisheries and aquaculture department tweeted that he was ‘profoundly sad and lost for words’ over ther death.
