In an interview with Tasnim, Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi scholar and political expert at the Institute for Persian Gulf Affairs, made a reference to a litany of tragic incidents during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca over the past years, putting the blame on the Al Saud for the losses of lives.
Describing Mecca as the “world’s most dangerous” religious city, Ahmed said more than 7,000 pilgrims have been killed in the holy city over the past 30 years in incidents that could have been averted.
On the deadly collapse of a construction crane in Mecca on Friday, the analyst said the real cause of the incident was not stormy weather but the fact that the crane had not been properly fixed to the ground.
On Friday evening, a large construction crane toppled over during a violent rainstorm and crashed into Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram (the Grand Mosque), killing at least 107 pilgrims and wounding 238 others.
Eight Iranian nationals were among those killed in the crash.
The incident has raised fears about the safety of the site before the yearly hajj pilgrimage that is expected to bring in hundreds of thousands of visitors to Saudi Arabia this month.
The Saudi government is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar project to enlarge the mosque, and the site is currently ringed with cranes.
Large-scale deadly accidents during hajj have occurred on a number of occasions in years past.
In 2006, more than 360 pilgrims died in a stampede at the desert plain of Mina, near Mecca. A crush of pilgrims two years earlier left 244 dead.
The worst hajj-related tragedy was in 1990, when 1,426 pilgrims died in a stampede in an overcrowded pedestrian tunnel leading to holy sites in Mecca.