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 scrambled 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 spokesperson General Mansur al-Turki said.
Turki said he had no immediate word on casualties in the city, where well more than one million people have already converged in readiness for the pilgrimage.
However, a French pilgrim who witnessed the collapse said 23 people died and more than 80 were injured when the five-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 south-eastern 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 50m 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 have set a midnight Wednesday deadline for the last pilgrims to arrive in the oil-rich kingdom.
They have also deployed about 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 and without the deadly incidents that have marred it in the past.
Stampedes killed 251 people in 2003 and 1 426 in 1990.
Firefighters and civil defence personnel were also included in the security team, which was to number 10 000 more men than last year.
There was no immediate word on what might have started the fire.
In previous years, camp fires have sparked infernos in pilgrim encampments, but the kingdom has also been battling deadly unrest blamed on al-Qaeda sympathisers since 2003.
Five police officers and two suspects on the kingdom’s list of 36 most-wanted militants were killed in clashes north of the capital, Riyadh, in the run-up to the pilgrimage.
The hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and Muslims are required to make it at least once in their lifetime if they have the means to do so.
Many come from as far afield as Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. — Sapa-AFP