“The list of missing Iranians has been passed on to Saudi authorities“, Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian said. All able-bodied Muslims with the financial means are required to undertake the pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam, at least once in their lifetime.
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More than 760 Hajj pilgrims were killed and 934 others were wounded in the Mina crush in Saudi Arabia.
About 2000 pilgrims died in the Thursday crush when performing religious rites.
Iranian Culture Minister Ali Janati is to head a delegation to Saudi Arabia to follow up on 323 Iranians, who Teheran says are missing.
French President Francois Hollande has told Iranian President Hassan Rouhani that the Hajj stampede should not worsen the relation between Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic, which already share a hard relation.
“This incident is absolutely subject to prosecution”, Raisi said.
An unnamed Iranian official said a group of 300 Iranian Haj pilgrims began moving from the opposite direction straight to Jamarat, instead of first going to their camps as is generally practiced by the Haj pilgrims.
He promised, “If mistakes were made, [the people] who made them will be held accountable”.
“One can not consider himself free from this sorrow [even] for a single moment and this sorrow has been weighing on the hearts of us and all Muslims during these past few days”, he added.
“You’re not responsible for what happened”, Sheikh Abdul Azia al-Sheikh told him, according to the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA).
“As for the things that humans can not control, you are not blamed for them”.
The stampede, the second deadly accident to strike the pilgrims this year, broke out during the symbolic stoning of the devil ritual, the Saudi civil defence service said.
Saudi King Salman, for his part, has called for a review of safety protocols in place for the hajj.
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The kingdom’s regional rival Iran expressed outrage at the deaths of 131 of its nationals at the world’s largest annual gathering of people, and politicians in Tehran suggested Riyadh was incapable of managing the event.
