Saudi Arabia on Friday suggested pilgrims ignoring crowd control rules bore some blame for a crush that killed over 700 people at the haj pilgrimage in the annual event's worst disaster for 25 years.
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With pilgrims frantically searching for missing compatriots and photographs of piles of the dead circulating on social media, the tragedy haunted many on the haj a day on.
"There were layers of bodies, maybe three layers," said one witness who asked not to be named. "Some people were alive under the pile of bodies and were trying to climb up but in vain, because their strength failed and they dropped dead.
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With pilgrims frantically searching for missing compatriots and photographs of piles of the dead circulating on social media, the tragedy haunted many on the haj a day on.
"There were layers of bodies, maybe three layers," said one witness who asked not to be named. "Some people were alive under the pile of bodies and were trying to climb up but in vain, because their strength failed and they dropped dead.
"I felt helpless not to be able to save people. I saw them dying in front of my eyes," he told Reuters.
An Algerian pilgrim told Algeria's al-Shurouk television: "We saw death: People were stepping over the mutilated bodies in front of you, four or five on top of each other." Source
Instead of taking responsibility for catastrophic event, a Saudi prince blamed African pilgrims:
Saudi Arabia's head of the central Hajj commitee, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, has blamed the crush outside the holy city of Mecca that killed at least 717 people and injured 850 more on "some pilgrims with African nationalities", according to Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV.
Source
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