BEIJING, Jan. 13 -- Muslim
pilgrims tripped over luggage while hurrying to ritually stone the devil
Thursday, causing a crush that trampled at least 345 people to death in
the latest stampede to mar Islam's annual hajj.
Among the dead, four were confirmed to be Chinese nationals, according to a
Foreign Ministry statement. Chinese diplomats have gone to the site to
gather information and to handle the tragic accident.
Saudi authorities have sought
for years to ease the flow of increasingly mammoth crowds, but the tragedy
underlined the difficulty in managing one of the biggest religious events
in the world, which this time drew more than 2.5 million pilgrims.
The deaths on the final day of stoning came a
week after another hajj disaster the Jan. 5 collapse of a building being
used as a pilgrims' hotel that killed 76 people in Mecca.
In the stoning ritual, all
the pilgrims must pass a series of three "pillars" called al-Jamarat,
which represent the devil and which the faithful pelt with stones to purge
themselves of sin.
The site in the desert of
Mina outside the holy city of Mecca is a notorious bottleneck in the
weeklong pilgrimage and has seen deadly incidents in seven of the past 17
years, including a stampede in 1990 that killed 1,426 people and one in
2004 that killed 244.
"I heard screaming and ...
saw people jumping over each other," said Suad Abu Hamada, an Egyptian
pilgrim. "Police starting pulling out bodies. The bodies were piled up. I
couldn't count them, they were too many."
Bodies covered in white
sheets lined the pavement near the ramp where the stampede occurred, and
emergency workers rushed the injured away on stretchers. Police cleared
part of the site, but thousands of pilgrims continued the stoning ritual.
The Interior Ministry put the
death toll at 345, and the Health Ministry said 289 people were injured.
State-run Al-Ekhbariyah television said most of the victims were from
South Asia.
After the 2004 stampede,
Saudi officials widened ramps leading to a platform the width of an
eight-lane highway where the three pillars are located and created more
emergency exits to accommodate the crowds.
Each of the small, round
pillars also were replaced with 85-foot-long walls to allow more people to
stone them at once without jostling each other. The walls were extended
through the bottom of the platform so more pilgrims can carry out the
stoning from below.
Thursday's stampede occurred
below the platform, near one of the four big ramps. In theory, the crowds
are supposed to enter the platform using two of the ramps and exit down
the other two, but pilgrims often ignore the rules.
Thousands of pilgrims were
rushing to complete the last of the three days of the stoning ritual
before sunset when some of them began to trip over dropped baggage,
causing a large pileup, said Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, spokesman for the
Interior Ministry.
Many pilgrims carry personal
belongings tents, clothes and bags of food as they move between the
various stages of the hajj.
"This was fate destined by
God," al-Turki said. "Some of the pilgrims were undisciplined and hasty to
finish the ritual as soon as possible."
Mina General Hospital, a
small facility near the al-Jamarat site, was filled with injured, and some
victims had to be sent to hospitals in Mecca and Riyadh, Dr. Ismail
Abdul-Zaher said.
Many pilgrims expressed
frustration over the repeated disasters at al-Jamarat.
"This should not happen every
year. It should be stopped, it's a scandal. There must be a way to
organize this better," said Anwar Sadiqi, a pilgrim from Pakistan.
Ensuring a smooth pilgrimage
is a key concern for Saudi Arabia's royal family, which bolsters its
legitimacy by touting its role as the "custodian of the holy cities" of
Mecca and Medina, where Islam's 7th century prophet Muhammad was born and
lived.
Crown Prince Sultan Bin Abdel
Aziz told reporters the kingdom had "spared no effort" to avoid such
disasters but, he added, "it cannot stop what God has preordained. It is
impossible."
"We feel pain and sorrow for
them and for their families and we send our condolences," the prince said
on Al-Ekhbariya television.
The hajj is a complex balance
of safety with Islam's requirements that every able-bodied Muslim should
perform the pilgrimage at least once. Saudi Arabia sets a quota of
participants, allowing every nation to send 1,000 pilgrims for every 1
million in population.
The three-day stoning ritual
in particular is a nightmarish problem in crowd dynamics.
Hundreds of thousands of
pilgrims must move up the ramps onto the platform, maneuver from pillar to
pillar and hit each with seven stones, then exit.
Many of the pilgrims are in a
rush because of the time constraints on the ritual and their anxiety about
past stampedes.
Traditionally, stoning was
carried out from midday to sunset.
Shiite Muslim clerics have
issued edicts allowing pilgrims to do the stoning in the morning, and some
Sunni clerics have followed suit in an attempt to space out the crowds.
But some clerics following Saudi Arabia's strict Wahhabi interpretation of
Islam urge the faithful to stick to the midday start.
About 60,000 Saudi police and
soldiers patrolled the Mina plain once the stoning ritual began Tuesday to
direct pilgrims. Helicopters flew overhead, and authorities monitored the
pilgrims from a control room through closed-circuit TV.
But some people complained
that police did little to help.
"They look indifferent. They
don't carry out their duties seriously," Iftikhar Hussein, an Iraqi
pilgrim, said. "This looks like a garage rather than a holy site."
"If hajj is a duty for every
able-bodied Muslim, it should be a duty for the government" to ensure it
is safe, she added.
Signs giving directions are
few, and pilgrims often ignore regulations. Peddlers selling food and
souvenirs also impede the pilgrims.
Saudi Arabia has announced
plans for further changes to the site in coming years that it says will
allow 500,000 pilgrims an hour to carry out the stoning.
Among the changes, the
platform is to be expanded to four levels, with 12 entrances and 12 exits.
Also, there are plans to bus pilgrims to al-Jamarat from a nearby tent
city in the desert rather than allow them to make their own way to the
site.
Thursday evening, the highway
from Mina to Mecca was packed with buses, trucks and cars carrying
pilgrims to the holy city for Friday's final rite of the hajj: the
"farewell tawwaf" a walk around the Kaaba, the black stone cube that all
Muslims face when they perform daily prayers.
(Source:
AP/chinadaily.com.cn) |