Saudis Face Growing Outrage as Hajj Death Toll Believed to Surpass 1,000

Over 1,000 people participating in the Hajj, the Islamic mandatory pilgrimage to Mecca, have reportedly died this year as of Friday, prompting growing outrage at authorities in Saudi Arabia for allegedly failing to offer proper safety protocol, access to water, and other services.

The Hajj officially ended on June 18, but families of many of those who attempted to participate in the ritual illegally are reportedly traveling to Saudi Arabia and attempting to find their loved ones in local hospitals. Some reports indicate that hundreds of thousands of people snuck into the Hajj illegally, which gave them passage to the key holy rituals of the pilgrimage but not to critical medical care, water, or air conditioning. The Saudi government itself claimed to remove hundreds of thousands of people illegally present before the Hajj began.

As these individuals are not registered with the Saudi government, Saudi authorities did not document their participation and thus in many cases cannot tell relatives where they are.

The Saudi government registered 1.8 million legal Hajj pilgrims this year.

The situation has created a rift between those who accuse the Saudi government of failing to properly organize the event, prevent the unregistered entry of pilgrims, and keep them safe – and those who note that the Saudi government maintains strict quotas on how many people can participate in the Hajj annually precisely to prevent unsafe overcrowding or heat exposure situations.

The German news outlet Deutsche Welle noted that many pilgrims documented harrowing scenes of people lying on the streets of the city, apparently dying.

“In several pictures, corpses appear to have been left where they presumably collapsed,” the report noted.

The Saudi government, which administers the Mecca site and organizes the Hajj annually, has offered no information on the number of deaths at the religious event this year. The Reuters news agency, citing an unnamed Saudi official, reported on Wednesday that the government had documented 2,700 cases of heat stroke, but Riyadh has otherwise not updated the public or the press on medical incidents at the Hajj.

The state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA) on Thursday published an update that the Saudi government had began offering “a comprehensive range of services for departing pilgrims” following the completion of the Hajj. Those pilgrims reportedly “expressed their gratitude and appreciation to the Saudi government … significant efforts and distinguished services.” That update also failed to mention any deaths or other medical incidents.

Multiple news outlets, citing death tolls from individual countries attempting to track down their citizens, reported on Friday that at least 1,081 people had died at this year’s Hajj, many of them Egyptians and Indonesians. The Egyptian government reportedly believes that 658 of its citizens died in the pilgrimage, the vast majority of them having entered the event illegally. The death toll nearly doubled from Tuesday to Thursday.

The number is significantly higher than the death toll last year, estimated to be around 230 people.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced following the end of the Hajj the creation of a “crisis unit” to find the country’s missing citizens in conjunction with the Saudi state. The government would also attempt to pursue and punish travel brokers who organized illegal Hajj trips, Cairo vowed.

The situation on the ground in Mecca this year was a difficult one, as temperatures in the desert city surpassed 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Many Hajj pilgrims are elderly people, as the pilgrimage is mandatory for all able-bodied Muslims and many older people rush to make the pilgrimage before they pass.

“She’s an old lady. She was tired,” Mohammed bint Salem Shushana, a Tunisian man searching hospitals for his 70-year-old unregistered pilgrim wife, told the U.K. Guardian. “She was feeling so hot, and she had no place to sleep. I looked for her in all the hospitals. Until now, I don’t have a clue.”

“Many Egyptian pilgrims come from poor villages. They spend their life savings on the spiritual journey to the holiest city in Islam,” the BBC reported in an interview with Sayyed, a man whose mother, 70-year-old Effendiya, died on the Hajj.

Effendiya reportedly entered the Hajj as an unregistered pilgrim after selling her jewelry to pay a shady travel broker who promised to get her to the pilgrimage safely. In reality, Sayyed said, “they were totally abandoned” once arriving near Mecca and had no acceptable shelter from the heat. Attempts to contact the travel broker following her death have failed.

“It was very difficult, especially during the stoning. People were just collapsed on the ground,” another Egyptian pilgrim identified as Ihlsa told Deutsche Welle, calling the Hajj “shameful” this year.

While some blamed the Saudi government, others lamented that many pilgrims did not abide by the safety rules. An anonymous witness, also from Egypt, described the pilgrims to Deutsche Welle as “noncompliant and also unaware” of the danger.

“Everyone just did what they wanted to, and the whole thing was badly organized. Additionally, there were not enough tents for everybody,” the witness lamented.

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