Muslim pilgrims and rescuers gather around the victims of a stampede in Mina, Saudi Arabia during the annual hajj pilgrimage on Thursday, September 24, 2015.
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The Iranians “should know better than to play politics with a tragedy”, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir told reporters on Saturday.
The stampede took place when two large groups of pilgrims collided at a crossroads in Mina, a few miles east of Mecca, on their way to performing the “Stoning of the Devil” ritual at Jamarat, Reuters reported.
“People come from various countries, speak various languages – there are no directions in their languages, there are no people who can direct them in their languages”, Mr Hussain said.
“Saudi Arabia is incapable of organising the pilgrimage”, said Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani, leading the main weekly prayers in Tehran. But Nigeria has dismissed such remarks, and King Salman has ordered a safety review to be conducted regarding Hajj.
In addition to the dead, 102 Iranians are known to have been injured and another 344 are unaccounted for, two days after the worst tragedy in a quarter-century at the pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest sites in Saudi Arabia. The Islamic Republic plans to sue the kingdom with at worldwide legal bodies, Prosecutor General Ibrahim Raeesi said, according to state-run television.
Meanwhile, as the BBC reports Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin-Abdullah al-Sheikh told Interior Minister Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who is also head of the Supreme Hajj Committee, that he is “not responsible for what happened”. As for the things that humans can not control, you can not blamed for them.
Earlier this month, the pilgrims saw another deadly incident, the collapse of a construction crane inMecca which killed more than 100 people and injured at least 200. “Muslim countries should focus on this”.
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The Saudi civil defence authority said 717 pilgrims from different nationalities were killed and 863 others were injured in the stampede.
