Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef has responded to criticism made by Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the kingdom’s ability to manage the pilgrimage after the deadly crush past year that killed hundreds of pilgrims.
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Iran said in May its pilgrims would not attend, blaming Riyadh for “sabotage” and failing to guarantee their safety.
The website of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei quotes him on Monday as saying, “The ruthless and criminal Saudi men locked half-alive injured people up along with the dead in tightly closed containers and martyred them”. Amoli Larijani believed that Saudis had no longer been eligible to rule the Holy Land and the cradle of Islam and other effective measures should be taken to effectively protect lives of millions of pilgrims annually coming to Saudi Arabia from death and debilitation as a result of administrative incompetency in the ranks and files of the Saudi government.
Instead of offering apology and expressing regret and prosecuting those directly behind this disgusting incident, Imam Khamenei continues, the Saudi rulers “even refused to set up an global Islamic fact-finding mission in ultimate shamelessness and impudence”.
His eminence reminds the Muslim Ummah that the Saudi rulers “have extended the hand of friendship to the occupying Zionist regime and have turned a blind eye to the heart-wrenching suffering and plight of Palestinians and have broadened the extent of their oppression and treason to cities and villages in Bahrain”.
“They have made the divine sanctuary unsafe for everybody”, Khamenei charged.
More than 460 Iranians were among the thousands of pilgrims who died in a stampede on September 24, 2015 in Mina, near Mecca, during the Hajj ritual.
“Because of these rulers’ oppressive behavior towards God’s guests, the world of Islam must fundamentally reconsider the management of the two holy places and the issue of hajj”.
“The world of Islam, including Muslim governments and peoples, must familiarise themselves with the Saudi rulers and correctly understand their blasphemous, faithless, dependent and materialistic nature”, Khamenei wrote. “They murdered them”, Ayatollah Khamenei added in his message to the hajj pilgrims.
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Riyadh-Tehran ties were severed for four years after more than 400 people were killed in Makkah during clashes between Iranian pilgrims staging an anti-US protest and Saudi security forces in 1987.
