http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/8212411.htm
Monorail Plan to Stop Fatal Crush at Mecca's Haj Ritual By Ben Wright, Sunday Business, London Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News Mar. 14 - Saudi Arabia has asked an Indian company to produce a study for a monorail in the holy city of Mecca to ease the crowd congestion during the annual Haj pilgrimage. Last month, in the latest of a series of tragedies, 251 pilgrims were trampled to death during the Eid al Adha or "stoning of the devil" ritual. The pilgrimage to Mecca is the largest annual gathering of humans in the world, with more than two million Muslims on average arriving in Saudi Arabia. After the tragedy, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia announced he would issue a royal decree ordering the holy cities of Medina and Mecca to be modernised to better accommodate the Haj. He said the Saudi government would call on foreign expertise for help. Now a team from the India-based Konkan Railway Corporation, including the first non-Muslims to set foot in Medina, has been given permission to enter the city to conduct a feasibility study for adopting its Sky Bus Metro technology. The Sky Bus consists of elevated carriages that hang from overhead rails, and Saudi officials are believed to be confident that it can be installed without damaging the heritage of the holy cities. Bojji Rajaram, the managing director of Konkan and inventor of Sky Bus technology, said that tests on the Sky Bus system would be complete soon. The company will then sign an initial contract with the Saudi government. "We will have completed the test track at Margao in Goa by April this year, and all test runs should be over by end of May," he said. The deaths during last month's Haj were the latest in a series at the annual pilgrimage. Last year, 14 pilgrims were killed and 35 died in 2001; the 1998 Haj saw 118 killed and more than 180 injured near the stone pillars just outside Medina that are stoned by pilgrims. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
