Ayatollah Khamenei also said that the Saudi rulers’ failure to guarantee the security of Hajj pilgrims proved that the kingdom did not merit the custodianship of Islam’s two Holy Mosques, adding this “reality should be propagated and well understood in the Muslim world”.
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The bitter war of words between Iran and Saudi Arabia intensified on Wednesday ahead of the annual haj pilgrimage+ from which Iranians have been excluded for the first time in decades.
The September 2015 stampede and crush of pilgrims killed at least 2,426 people, according to an Associated Press count.
Ashtari said on Thursday that the Islamic Republic of Iran has submitted a complaint to the Interpol over the deadly crush in the Saudi city of Mina on September 24, 2015.
Iran had the highest death toll of any country, with 464 Iranian pilgrims killed.
In January, relations were severed again after Iranian demonstrators torched the Saudi embassy and a consulate following the kingdom’s execution of a prominent Shiite cleric. The Pakistani government, a recipient of Saudi aid, ordered the Pakistani media not to criticize the Saudis’ handling of the Mina stampede, which killed 83 Pakistanis. For the Grand Mufti, an influential scholar respected across the globe, to say that “they (Iranians) are children of Magi and their hostility towards Muslims is an old one”, is truly shocking and will haunt Shia communities living across the region for years to come.
Riyadh and Tehran are at odds over a raft of regional issues, notably the conflicts in Syria and Yemen in which they support opposing sides.
Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion predating Christianity and Islam and was the dominant religion in Persia before the Arab conquest. There are reasons to believe that political and diplomatic ties between the two countries are to be blamed for inability of Iranian pilgrims to perform Hajj this year and not security or logistic arrangements as is being claimed.
Hardline Sunnis – including many adherents of Wahhabism, the austere form of Islam practised by the Saudi ruling family and religious establishment – often describe Shia as “rejectionists” who have strayed from the true faith.
The cause of last year’s tragedy is yet to be determined by a Saudi investigation.
Custodian of Islam’s most revered places in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia stakes its reputation on organizing hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam which every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to is obliged to undertake at least once.
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“If we do not say Mina stampede was premeditated, this incompetency and lack of prudence is a crime”, the official website of the leader quoted him as saying at a gathering of the relatives of Iranian victims of Mina stampede that took place previous year near the holy city of Mecca.
