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Iranians are not Muslims: Saudi top cleric

The Crown Prince reminded the Iranian supreme leader that Saudi had previously accommodated Iranian pilgrims with all the same facilities as all other pilgrims.

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The Supreme Leader of Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of “murdering” pilgrims injured in a deadly stampede during last year’s haj and demanded that the kingdom be stripped of its right to oversee Islam’s holiest sites.

He was due to meet later on Wednesday with the families of some of the more than 400 Iranian victims of the stampede.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said earlier this year it remains “very concerned” for the safety of its nationals and will not be sending any pilgrims to Mecca or Medina this year.

Zayani said the Gulf Arab states “reject the unjust media campaign and the successive declarations of senior Iranian leaders against the Saudi kingdom”.

Next week marks the start of the hajj, when millions of Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims from around the world – dubbed “guests of Allah ” – travel to the Mecca, location of Islam’s most revered shrine, the Sacred Mosque, to comply with one of the five pillars of Islam.

On Monday, Khamenei raised the stakes in the dispute over hajj by saying Saudi officials had “murdered” hajj pilgrims who were injured in the stampede.

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud directed on Monday all government and private sectors and bodies concerned with the services of pilgrims, stressing the importance of joint effort to provide the best services to pilgrims and facilitate all ways to perform their Hajj rituals easily and comfortably. Even before last year’s stampede, he writes, “Tehran has been involved in many incidents that led to the death of pilgrims”.

“We must understand these are not Muslims”, he was quoted as saying. In recent years, their rivalry has intensified politically, militarily and ideologically across the region, and the two are engaged in proxy conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

A former senior USA foreign policy official, John Hannah, last month cited Gulf sources in an article for Foreign Policy magazine, saying that “the Saudis did in fact go out of their way to make Iranian attendance hard”.

Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with Iran as Riyadh’s diplomatic posts in Tehran and Mashhad were attacked in public mobs, following the Saudi execution of Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr in January.

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Saudi Arabia is the Middle East’s dominant Sunni Muslim power, and Iran its leading Shiite power. Some 1.5 million of the e-bracelets, which are encoded with identification information and relevant contact details, are to be distributed.

Iranians have been excluded fro travelling to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj pilgrimage this yearReuters