The death toll from this year’s hajj has exceeded 1,000 on Thursday, more than half unregistered worshipers who performed the pilgrimage in extreme heat in Saudi Arabia.
The new deaths reported on Thursday included 58 from Egypt, said an Arab diplomat who provided a breakdown showing that of 658 Egyptians who died, 630 were unregistered pilgrims.
About 10 countries have reported 1,081 deaths during the pilgrimage, one of the five pillars of Islam which all Muslims with the means must complete at least once.
Photo: AP
The hajj, whose timing is determined by the lunar Islamic calendar, fell during the oven-like Saudi summer again this year.
The Saudi national meteorological center reported a high of 51.8°C this week at the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
A Saudi study published last month said temperatures in the area are rising 0.4°C each decade.
Each year tens of thousands of pilgrims try to join the hajj through irregular channels, as they cannot afford the often costly official permits.
Saudi Arabian authorities reported clearing hundreds of thousands of unregistered pilgrims from Mecca this month, but it appears many still participated in the main rites which began on Friday last week.
This group was more vulnerable, because without official permits they could not access air-conditioned spaces provided for the 1.8 million authorized pilgrims to cool down.
“People were tired after being chased by security forces before Arafat day. They were exhausted,” one Arab diplomat said on Thursday of day-long outdoor prayers on Saturday last week that marked the hajj’s climax.
The diplomat said the main cause of death among Egyptian pilgrims was the heat, which triggered complications related to high blood pressure and other issues.
Egyptian officials were visiting hospitals to obtain information and help Egyptian pilgrims get medical care, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday.
“However, there are large numbers of Egyptian citizens who are not registered in hajj databases, which requires double the effort and a longer time to search for missing persons and find their relatives,” it said.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has ordered that a “crisis cell” headed by the Egyptian prime minister follow up on the deaths of the country’s pilgrims.
Sisi stressed “the need for immediate coordination with the Saudi authorities to facilitate receiving the bodies of the deceased and streamline the process,” said a statement from his office.
More fatalities were also confirmed on Thursday by Pakistan and Indonesia.
Out of about 150,000 pilgrims, Pakistan has so far recorded 58 deaths, a diplomat said.
“I think given the number of people, given the weather, this is just natural,” the diplomat said.
Indonesia, which had about 240,000 pilgrims, raised its death toll to 183, the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs said, compared with 313 deaths recorded last year.
Deaths have also been confirmed by Malaysia, India, Jordan, Iran, Senegal, Tunisia, Sudan and Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region. In many cases, authorities have not specified the cause.
Friends and relatives have been searching for missing pilgrims, scouring hospitals and pleading online for news, fearing the worst.
Two diplomats on Thursday said that Saudi authorities had begun the burial process for dead pilgrims, cleaning the bodies and putting them in white burial cloth and taking them to be interred.
“The burial is done by the Saudi authorities. They have their own system so we just follow that,” said one diplomat, who said his country was working to notify loved ones as best it could.
A 2019 study by the journal Geophysical Research Letters said because of climate change, heat stress for hajj pilgrims would exceed the “extreme danger threshold” from 2047 to 2052 and 2079 to 2086, “with increasing frequency and intensity as the century progresses.”
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