2015 Mina stampede

The incident happened in Mina at the intersection of streets 204 and 223 leading up to Jamaraat Bridge. The cause of the disaster is disputed. The Mina disaster has inflamed tensions between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, which were already raised due to the wider turmoil in the Middle East, such as the Syrian Civil War and Yemeni Civil War. In a press conference held on the day of the incident, Saudi Ministry of Interior spokesman Mansour Al-Turki attempted to address most issues regarding the incident. He said that an investigation was ongoing, and that the exact cause of the overcrowding that led to a deadly crush on Mina Street 204 is yet to be ascertained.

Background

The Hajj is an annual pilgrimage in Mecca prescribed as a duty for Muslims to undertake at least once in their lifetime if they can afford to do so physically and financially. As traditionally performed, the Hajj consists of a series of rites including the Stoning of the Devil (Arabic: رمي الجمرات‎‎ ramī aj-jamarāt) which takes place at the Jamaraat Bridge in Mina, a district a few miles east of Mecca. The Jamaraat Bridge is a pedestrian bridge from which pilgrims can throw pebbles at the three jamrah pillars. The stoning ritual is the last major ritual and is often regarded as the most dangerous part of the Hajj, with its large crowds, confined spaces, and tight scheduling.

The 2015 Hajj took place against a background of regional turmoil (including wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya), the hottest temperatures in Mecca in 20 years, the threat of MERS, and pre-existing tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

A number of Hajj-related crowd crush disasters have occurred in the past, with 1,426 people being suffocated and trampled to death in a 1990 tunnel tragedy, and at least 701 people killed in crowd crushes between 1991 and 2005. 346 people were killed in a similar Jamaraat incident in 2006, which prompted the Saudi government to improve the infrastructure of the city and its procession routes.

The Saudi Arabian government has been spending $60 billion to expand the Grand Mosque which houses the Kaaba, and has deployed 100,000 security forces and 5,000 CCTV cameras to monitor the crowds. The Saudis have also built a permanent tent city in the Mina valley. It is covered with approximately 160,000 air conditioned tents across multiple campsites (grouped by nationality) for use by Hajj pilgrims.

Disaster

According to a statement by the Saudi civil defence directorate, a stampede occurred Thursday 24 September 2015 at 09:00 Mecca time (06:00 UTC) at the junction between street 204 and 223 as pilgrims were en route to the Jamaraat Bridge. The Saudi Interior Ministry stated that the stampede was triggered when two large groups of pilgrims intersected from different directions onto the same street. The area was not previously identified as a dangerous bottleneck. The junction lay between two pilgrim camp sites. The International Business Times and the Daily Mail reported that the governor of Mecca Province and Saudi Arabia's head of the central Hajj committee, Prince Khalid bin Faisal Al Saud, blamed the crush outside the holy city on "some pilgrims with African nationalities"; this caused some African leaders to lash out in response.

Press TV reported that an Iranian survivor of the Mina incident, whose name was not revealed, said only a handful of Saudi soldiers assisted those being trampled in the crush. "When I returned to the disaster point to help, Saudi soldiers prevented me from entering the area. This, as only a handful of Saudi soldiers were helping the victims, while a large number of them were standing by idly and looking," the man told Press TV. A number of other survivors have also shared similar accounts, saying that mismanagement by the Saudi authorities and a poor rescue response complicated the situation.

In a press conference held the day of the incident, spokesman of the Ministry of Interior Mansour Al-Turki attempted to address the incident. He said that an investigation was ongoing, that the exact causes for crowding that led to the deadly stampede on Mina Street 204 are yet to be ascertained. He explained that "Street number 204 is a road leading from the camps to the Jamarat Bridge. What happened was that a group of pilgrims on buses were allowed to descend onto the pathways that lead to the Jamarat Bridge at a time that wasn’t allocated to them," Al Arabiya News Channel’s correspondent in Mina, Saad Al-Matrafi said. "As they neared the area, they converged with an existing group of people who were already in the area, which pushed the area to over capacity."

One day after the Mina crush tragedy, Saudi media publicized a statement by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh, exonerating Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef (known as "MBN") from responsibility for the disaster, as his Interior Minister title holds him accountable for safety issues at the Mecca shrine. The Grand Mufti's statement, which characterized the incident as "beyond human control", "inevitable", and attributable to "fate", immunized MBN against possible domestic criticism.

Casualties

The exact casualty figure for the Mina crowd collapse is disputed. The Saudi government claims only 769 deaths while Iranian media sources have proposed figures as high as 4,173. Independent estimates range between 2,236 and 2,431 (see nationalities of victims table) people killed, with the most recent Associated Press estimate giving a death toll of 2,411, based on "media reports and officials' comments from 36 of the over 180 countries that sent citizens to the hajj".

Estimates of the injured and missing also vary greatly; Saudi reports claim 934 injured; Iranian reports are much higher, estimating more than 2,000 injuries. On the day of the disaster, the Saudi Civil Defence directorate stated that casualties were of multiple nationalities and announced the deployment of 4,000 personnel to the stampede site alongside 220 emergency response units. Pilgrims were redirected away from the stampede site, and the Saudi Red Crescent Authority was mobilised. Medics at Mina's emergency hospital said they alone received almost 700 people on the day of the incident. The eight hospitals around the Hajj landmarks and the six main hospitals in the city of Mecca were operating at full capacity after the stampede, medics said.

By 2 October 2015, the Saudi Arabia Health Ministry stated they had completed the DNA profiling of all unidentified pilgrims who were killed or injured in the crush. DNA samples of the next of kin of Hajj stampede victims were collected at Al-Nour Specialist Hospital, Mecca.

Investigation

In a statement released by the Saudi embassy, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir stated, "The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques has directed to launch a thorough investigation that will be transparent [...] We will reveal the facts when they emerge, and we will not hold anything back. If mistakes were made, those who made them will be held accountable, and we will make sure that we will learn from this in order to ensure that it doesn’t happen again."

Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef is overseeing the official investigation. Saudi newspapers reported that on October 18, 2015 bin Nayef had spoken to the investigators and urged them to "continue their efforts to find the causes of the accident, praying to Allah Almighty to accept the martyrs and wishing the injured a speedy recovery." However, Saudi Arabia has not yet released any findings by their investigators.

Prompted by difficulties in identifying bodies after the Mina disaster, Saudi Arabian Deputy Minister of Health, Dr. Hamad Al-Duwailie, announced plans to require all Hajj pilgrims to wear an electronic bracelet continaing identity information. Al-Duwailie also said that Saudi Ministry of Health would upgrade its current Hajj and Umrah committee a permanent coordinating body within the Ministry. In January 2016, the Saudi Shura Council recommended "raising the capacity of roads leading to the Jamarat facility, and to the accommodation areas in Mina" as well as more studies on Hajj-related transportation flow.

Najmedin Meshkati, Professor of Engineering and International Relations at the University of Southern California, who is an expert in accident investigation, recommended in a self-authored opinion piece in the World Post that, "the Saudi government should embark on the immediate creation of an independent investigation commission/panel. This interdisciplinary commission/panel should be chaired by a nationally renowned Saudi statesman or scholar, with members selected from Saudi Arabia and affected countries based on their technical expertise and to include responsible governmental entities, first responder agencies, and academics of requisite disciplines for accident investigation. [...] And it should be empowered by the subpoena power and charged to conduct a comprehensive, systematic and interdisciplinary investigation by employing the system-oriented, robust 'AcciMap' methodology to write the most technically-sound report on the root-causes of this tragedy".

Amer Shalaby is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Toronto's Transportation Research Institute, former Hajj pilgrim, and consultant to Saudi government on crowd management. Shalaby, who specializes in transportation planning for large-scale events, proposes using "smart phones and other static and dynamic sensors" to provide authorities real-time information that could identify potential hot spots during the Hajj. He also suggests that "some of the effective methods of highway traffic flow management, such as flow metering, could be adapted for streamlining crowd flows in Mecca."

Keith Still, Professor of Crowd Science at Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain, who helped redesign the Jamaraat (the pillars representing the devil stoned by pilgrims) after a disaster in 2004, said there was criticism at the time that the upgrades at the Jamaraat had not been extended to other areas. He said "For complex systems that flow in and out, if you make one change along the way it can have knock-on and ripple effects elsewhere. Change any one part of system with 3 million people, and there's a danger of an accident like this."

Mohammed Ajmal, a physician specializing in Emergency Medicine and former manager of a medical center set up to treat Indian Hajj pilgrims, details issues with both the design of the Mina tent city and quick access to disaster medical care at the site. Ajmal points to structural design flaws in Mina, calling it a "badly designed death trap—in times of disaster" as it attempts to funnel tens of thousands of people through T intersections, such as the junction of Streets 204 and 223 where the crush took place. Compression Asphyxia is the cause of death for most victims of a crowd collapse, and can occur in within ten minutes; Ajmal notes that Mina's design prevents medical care from arriving within that time frame stating that people at crush site with the commonly seen crowd flow pattern are "destined to die" within minutes before any medical help can reach the site.