Iran is welcoming a plane carrying home the first group of Iranian pilgrims killed in last week’s stampede during the annual Muslim hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.
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An official repatriation ceremony is slated to be held on Saturday morning at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani and a number of high-ranking officials attending the service.
Indonesia reported nine more dead over the weekend from the Saudi hajj stampede, raising the country’s death toll to 100.
Two columns of pilgrims converged on a narrow street leading hundreds of people to die through suffocation or being trampled.
During weekly prayers at Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Sheikh Saleh al-Taleb said the kingdom “is capable of managing hajj affairs” without outsiders suggesting they can do better.
“If it is proven that a number of [Saudi] authorities are to blame for the incident, we will never forgive [those accountable for] the blood of our loved ones”, Rouhani stated.
“Mismanagement was the main cause of the stampede in September 24”, said Sheikh Abdulmalik Almas, a Shia-ithnesheriyah theological scholar and a pilgrim who survived the ordeal.
The local situation where the incident occurred as well as the statements of people who were with Roknabadi before he went missing eliminates the kidnapping possibility, Qashqavi added. Iran attributed the crime to the Saudi government in line with the worldwide Customary Law.
The data was obtained after the Indonesian Haj Committee managed to identify 31 more bodies in Saudi Arabian hospitals.
The news reports coming out of Saudi Arabia and Iran on the Hajj crush moved swiftly from sympathy to recrimination and started to look like a proxy war of words.
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One crowd had just finished a ritual in which pilgrims throw pebbles at three stone columns representing the devil – a rite central to Hajj – when it ran into another wave of people heading to perform the rite. It had also accused Riyadh of a cover-up, saying the real death toll exceeds 4,700, without providing evidence to support its claim.
