MECCA, Saudi Arabia (AP) – Hundreds of people have died during this year’s hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as worshipers braved high temperatures at Islam’s holy sites in the desert kingdom, officials said Wednesday as people tried to claim their bodies. lovable.
Saudi Arabia has yet to comment on the death toll amid the heat during the pilgrimage, which every Muslim is required to do once in their lives, or give a cause for those who died. However, hundreds of people have lined up at the Emergency Complex in the neighborhood of Al-Muaisem in Mecca, trying to get information about missing family members.
One list circulating online suggested at least 550 people died during the five-day Hajj. A medic who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss information not publicly released by the government said the names appeared to be genuine. The doctor and another official who also spoke on condition of anonymity said they believed there were at least 600 bodies at the facility. The list contained no cause of death.
Each year, the hajj draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from low-income countries, “many of whom lack pre-Hajj health care,” says an article in the April issue of the Journal of Infection and Public Health. . Communicable diseases can spread among those who gather, many of whom save their entire lives for the trip and who may be elderly with pre-existing health conditions, the paper added.
However, the number of deaths this year suggests something is causing the death toll to rise. Already, several countries have said some pilgrims have died in the heat that has crossed the holy site in Mecca, including Jordan and Tunisia.
Temperatures on Tuesday reached 47 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit) in Mecca and holy sites in and around the city, according to the Saudi National Meteorological Center. The onlookers saw a man pass out while trying to stone the Devil symbolically.
At Mecca’s Grand Mosque, temperatures reached 51.8 C (125 F) on Monday even as worshipers had left for Mina, authorities said.
Others, including many Egyptians, lost loved ones to the heat and crowds. More than 1.83 million Muslims will perform the hajj in 2024, including more than 1.6 million pilgrims from 22 countries, and about 222,000 Saudi nationals and citizens, according to the Saudi Hajj authority.
On Wednesday at the medical complex in Mecca, Egyptians fell to the ground when they heard the name of their mother among the dead. She cried for a while before grabbing her mobile phone and calling the travel agent, shouting: “They left her to die!” The crowd tried to calm the man down.
Security was seen to be tight at the complex, with an official reading of the names of the dead and their nationalities, including people from Algeria, Egypt and India. People who said they were relatives of the dead were allowed in to identify the deceased.
The AP could not independently confirm the cause of death for the bodies held at the complex. Saudi officials did not respond to requests for more information.
The Al Saud family that rules the kingdom has great influence in the Muslim world through its oil wealth and management of Islam’s holiest sites. Like Saudi kings before him, King Salman has taken the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, referring to the Grand Mosque in Mecca, home to the cube-shaped Kaaba where Muslims pray five times a day, and the Prophet’s Mosque near the city of Medina.
Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars on crowd control and security measures for those attending the annual five-day pilgrimage, but the sheer number of participants has made safety difficult.
Climate change could make the risk even greater. A 2019 study by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that even if the world were to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, the Hajj pilgrimage would take place at temperatures above the “threshold of extreme danger” from 2047 to 2052, and from 2079 to 2079. 2086.
Islam follows the lunar calendar, so the Hajj falls about 11 days earlier each year. In 2030, the Hajj will take place in April, and for the next few years it will fall in winter, when temperatures are milder.
A 2015 stampede in Mina during the hajj killed more than 2,400 pilgrims, the deadliest incident to hit the pilgrimage, according to an AP count. Saudi Arabia has never acknowledged the total number of stampedes. A separate crane in Mecca’s Grand Mosque, which preceded the Mina disaster, killed 111 people.
The second deadliest incident in the pilgrimage was the 1990 tragedy that killed 1,426 people.
