Pilgrims reported feeling the hands of their relatives slip away into the crowd on Thursday morning when a crush at the Mina camp in Mecca reportedly killed at least 769 in the deadliest Hajj disaster in a generation.
Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars on making the world’s biggest gathering of people safe. For nine years, there had been no major disasters at the Hajj, a much lauded success after a period from 1990-2006 when crowd crushes and fires that killed hundreds of people took place every 2-3 years.
But Thursday morning’s crush - as millions of people tried to reach three walls to pelt them with stones in a ritual intended to drive out Satan - proved that those preparations were inadequate for the world’s greatest crowd control challenge.
“There was no way out. You saw parents leaving their children and the elderly to survive,” said a Nigerian survivor, Dahiru Shittu Ibrahim, 37.
Saudi Arabia’s management of the annual pilgrimage has been a divisive issue in parts of the Muslim world for decades as the Hajj has grown in scale and danger.
Witnesses have described police closing off roads, although they are not able to say why. Closing routes in one location is a standard measure to control crowds building up elsewhere.
Saudi officials have suggested that the crush may have been caused by crowds failing to stick to the complicated schedules laid out by its government to control the movement of millions of people across the site.
An official inquiry into the disaster announced by King Salman is to be carried out by Saudi officials alone.
But whatever the immediate cause of the bottleneck, it appears to have taken place at a location not previously identified as a major choke point, suggesting that the Saudi authorities underestimated the work needed to make the haj safe.
Stoning the devil
At midnight on Wednesday, two million pilgrims ended the day’s 20-kilometre trek at Muzdalifah, a rocky plain east of Mecca. There, they rested under the stars and gathered pebbles for the next day’s ritual: hurling stones at three walls known as Jamarat, to reenact the stoning of Satan by the prophet Ibrahim at a bridge.
The stoning has long been the most dangerous part of the Hajj, requiring a high level of coordination to ensure that huge crowds arrive and clear away in time for the next group.
Between 1990 and 2006, stampedes and crushes occurred regularly at the Jamarat site, killing hundreds of people.
Much of the billions of dollars Saudi Arabia has invested in crowd safety at the Hajj has been spent upgrading the Jamarat. Access routes were widened. Vertical tiers and entry and exit points were added to increase capacity and safety. Advanced crowd monitoring software and video cameras allow the authorities to control access, to make sure people do not arrive faster than they can leave.
Jamarat is not the only danger point. Before the masses descend on the walls, they first camp at Mina, a dense, grid-like tent city built into the bottom of a narrow valley and split into camps by nationality.
The main danger at Mina for years was from fires in the tents, which could sweep across the camp, trigger stampedes and kill hundreds of people.
The authorities have invested in extensively upgrading the tents and making them fireproof in Mina. But less attention appears to have been paid to controlling crowd movement there than at the Jamarat site itself.
Upgrades of Mina are difficult because although religious tradition requires pilgrims to camp there, it is located in a small area, bounded by steep rocky walls to the sides and other religious sites at each end.
The Hajj is overseen by its own ministry within the Saudi government, with a department known as Mutawwif that provides guides and other services for pilgrims. Mutawwif staff work with police to schedule the movements of huge crowds, with timetables posted around the camp at Mina in six languages.
If a delay occurs elsewhere, the police tell the Mutawwif, who are then responsible for rescheduling movements.
Saudi Arabia’s Health Minister Khalid al-Falih suggested that the disaster was caused by a failure to stick to the schedule.
“Some pilgrims moved without following instructions,” he said.