A total of 23,191 Bangladeshi pilgrims’ travel to Saudi Arabia to perform this year’s Hajj is still uncertain as 144 agencies, which are supervising their itineraries, are yet to issue the pay orders against plane tickets.
Regarding this matter, the Ministry of Religious Affairs on Sunday issued two separate special notices asking the owners or representatives of these agencies to attend two meetings with the ministry on Monday and Tuesday.
According to the first notice, 56 out of these 144 Hajj agencies, despite repeated directives, failed to issue the pay orders and ensure plane tickets for 12,949 registered pilgrims.
The ministry will sit with these 56 agencies on Monday.
There are total 528 Hajj agencies taking pilgrims to Saudi Arabia this year for the biggest congregation of Muslims of the world.
According to the second notice, 88 Hajj agencies, despite repeated directives, also failed to issue the pay orders and ensure plane tickets for 10,242 registered pilgrims – each of these agencies are responsible for 50 or more pilgrims.
The ministry will sit on Tuesday with these agencies, which has managed to issue the pay orders only for 10,937 out of 21,179 registered pilgrims so far, said the notice.
Both meetings will be held at the Religious Affairs Ministry’s conference room in the Secretariat and chaired by the ministry's secretary Anisur Rahman.
The notices also mentioned that these 144 agencies did not pay attention to the advertisements published on national dailies urging all agencies to take proper measures to avoid such uncertainty.
The Hajj flights started on Saturday. Earlier, the Saudi government had announced that they would not give any additional slots for Hajj flights this year.
The ministry's Joint Secretary (Hajj) Md Hafiz Uddin told the Dhaka Tribune: “We had asked all the agencies to complete the required tasks within the deadline, but these 144 agencies failed to follow through. That’s why we will sit with them and try to sort out the problems that have risen.”
This year a total of 126,798 pilgrims from Bangladesh will go to going Saudi Arabia to perform the Hajj. Of them, 2,321 pilgrims have already reached Saudi Arabia on Saturday’s flights.