Saudi Arabia hiding real crush death toll: Pundit
Press TV has interviewed Massoud Shajareh, the head of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, in London, and Saeed Sadek, a professor at the American University of Cairo, to discuss the Saudis’ mismanagement of the Hajj pilgrimage.
Shajareh says the recent incident during Hajj rituals near Mecca was not a crush but a deliberate plot to cage pilgrims in and continuously push them “like animals,” adding that the victims of Mina died from lack of water, exhaustion and suffocation.
Pointing to the main cause of the incident in Mina, he says all eyewitnesses said the Saudi security forces pushed the pilgrims to one path and they had no other choice.
The Saudi officials did not take responsibility for the incident, trying to censor reports in this regard, he says, adding that Saudi Arabia attempted to blame the pilgrims for the catastrophe and evade accountability for its criminal negligence and mismanagement.
He says the Saudi authorities are hiding the exact number of victims and even do not show the footages of security cameras installed at the scene of the crush.
For his part, Sadek believes the crush was an unpreventable incident. He urges other nations to wait for the official report on the cause of the Mina crush, arguing that if the Muslim states are not pleased with the result of the Saudi investigation, they will be able to ask for the intervention of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
Sadek calls for a summit between high-ranking Saudi and Iranian officials to resolve the differences on the Hajj incidents.
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