Stampede Kills 345 At Hajj Ritual

Pilgrims Crushed At Stoning Ritual Despite Efforts To Ease Crowd Flow

(CBS/AP) 
Mina General Hospital, a small facility several hundred yards from the site, was filled with injured, and some victims were sent to hospitals in Mecca and Riyadh, said Ismail Abdul-Zaher, a doctor at the hospital.

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." Anwar Sadiqi, a Pakistani pilgrim, said.

Ensuring a smooth pilgrimage is a key concern for Saudi Arabia's royal family, which bolsters its legitmacy by touting its role as the "custodian of the holy cities" — Mecca and Medina, where Islam's 7th century prophet Muhammad was born and lived.

The annual hajj is a complex balance of safety with Islam's requirements that every able-bodied Muslim should perform the hajj 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 stoning ritual in particular is a nightmarish problem in crowd dynamics.

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims must move up the ramps onto the platform — which is several hundred yards long and the width of an eight-lane highway in parts — maneuver from pillar to pillar and hit each with seven stones, then exit the platform.

Many of the pilgrims are in a rush because of time constraints on the ritual and are nervous because they remember the past stampedes.

Traditionally, the stoning is carried out from midday to sunset. Shiite Muslim clerics have issued fatwas, or religious 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 advise the faithful to stick to the midday start.

About 60,000 Saudi troops have been patrolling the Mina plain since the stoning ritual began on Tuesday to direct pilgrims. Helicopters fly overhead, and authorities monitor the pilgrims from a control room through closed-circuit television.

But some complained the police did little to help the flow of traffic.

"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 said.

Signs giving directions are few, and pilgrims often ignore regulations, entering the platform via ramps meant for exiting and vice versa. Peddlers selling food and souvenirs also mingle among the pilgrims, jamming up traffic.

Saudi Arabia has announced plans for further changes to the site in coming years that it says would allow some 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 allowing 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 back to the holy city for the final rite of the hajj — the "farewell tawwaf," or circumambulation of the Kaaba, the black stone cube that all Muslims face when they perform daily prayers. The hajj ends on Friday.