Twenty-three pilgrims were killed and scores more wounded in the Saudi holy city of Mecca when a building collapsed in the latest tragedy to hit Hajj.
MECCA: Twenty-three Muslim pilgrims were killed and scores more wounded in the Saudi holy city of Mecca on Thursday when a building collapsed in the latest tragedy to hit the annual hajj, a witness said.
Rescue teams were summoned to search for survivors after the collapse which happened in the heart of the city in an area normally packed with vehicles and pedestrians, Saudi interior ministry spokesman General Mansur al-Turki said.
Turki said he had no immediate word on casualties in the city, where well over one million people had already converged in readiness for the pilgrimage.
However a French pilgrim who witnessed the collapse said that 23 people died and more than 80 were injured when the multi-storey hostel housing mainly Indian or Emirati pilgrims caved in following a fire.
“For the moment, I counted 23 bodies. The wounded are more than 80,” said the witness, Abderrahmane Ghoul, who heads an Islamic organisation in southeastern France.
“I was present. It started with a fire in the building. A helicopter started to sprinkle water to put out the fire. Afterwards, the building collapsed,” Ghoul said. He said the pilgrims’ hostel lay just 50 meters from Mecca’s Great Mosque, Islam’s holiest shrine.
He said the death toll would have been much higher if the tragedy had not struck during one of the five daily prayers observed by Muslims, although many of the casualties were among those praying in the square outside.
More than 2.5 million pilgrims are expected to converge on Mecca for the hajj, which formally kicks off on Sunday. In the face of the massive numbers, the Saudi authorities had set a midnight Wednesday deadline for the last pilgrims to arrive in the oil-rich kingdom.
They had also deployed some 60,000 security personnel to try to prevent any repetitions of the deadly stampedes and structural failures that have marred previous pilgrimages.
It is a matter of national pride for Saudi Arabia, which considers itself the custodian of Islam’s two holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina, that the annual pilgrimage go smoothly. Stampedes killed 251 people in 2003 and 1,426 in 1990. There was no immediate word on what might have started the fire.
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