Saudis should be held accountable for missing pilgrims

On the sidelines of the funeral ceremony for the victims of Mina Tragedy on Sunday, Ali Shamkhani pointed to the continuous efforts of Iran’s government for the identification and transfer of those who were killed in Mina incident and stated that, “the announced statistics belong to the victims whose bodies have been identified and there exist pilgrims with unidentified bodies who are considered as missing.”

The official stressed Iran’s unchanging sensitivity on issue of missing people in the accident and expressed hope that the Saudi government will take up necessary cooperative measures by taking responsibility of the missing pilgrims.

Shamkhani deemed Saudi Arabia’s effort to find the exact cause of the disaster and punishment of those responsible for the tragedy as the first step and as a sign of respect on the part of Saudi government towards its legal and religious responsibilities and asserted that, “Saudi Arabia’s mismanagement and incompetence in dealing with the incident has reached to extremes that other hypotheses cannot be ruled out.”

Underlining that the tragic disaster has caused a huge moral damage to Islam, he concluded that, “terrorist activities carried out by Takfiri groups combined with tragic images of forced migration of the oppressed Syrian Muslims as well as incompetency in conducting Hajj rituals have offered an inappropriate and unrealistic image of Islam to the world.”