SAUDI ARABIAN POLICE CLAIM 1,100 PHOTOS OF DEAD ARE FROM START OF HAJJ, AND NOT STAMPEDE ALONE

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Mecca: Saudi Arabia today said the nearly 1,100 photos distributed to foreign diplomats to help identify nationals who have died in the hajj are from the entire pilgrimage and not just a disaster near Mecca. Officials in India and Pakistan said a day earlier that Saudi officials gave their diplomats some 1,090 pictures of those killed in last Thursday's disaster in Mina, where two waves of pilgrims converged on a narrow road, causing hundreds of people to suffocate or be trampled to death.But Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Mansour al-Turki told Associated Press the pictures also include people who died of natural causes. Many are pilgrims who reside in the kingdom and perform the hajj without the legal permits. Some are labourers from South Asian countries who choose to work in the kingdom in order to perform the hajj. The list also includes unidentified victims from the 111 people who died when a crane tipped over into Mecca's Grand Mosque on 11 September.The Saudi Health Ministry says the death toll for the incident in Mina on September 24 remains 769 people, with another 934 injured in the crush of pilgrims who were performing one of the final rites of the hajj. It was the worst disaster to strike the annual pilgrimage in a quarter-century. Faisal Alzahrani, the Health Ministry's general director of communications, told the AP today that this figure remained accurate.Alzahrani said civil defence authorities would be responsible for announcing any new death toll, though most recently they relied on Health Ministry statistics. Civildefence officials could not be immediately reached.Indonesia, which sends the largest contingent of pilgrimsannually to the hajj, today criticised Saudi Arabia's slowresponse to incident in Mina, saying its diplomats onlyreceived full access to the dead and injured on Monday night,four days after the disaster.That access included seeing forensic records likefingerprints, said Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, an official inIndonesia's Foreign Ministry. Those fingerprints may provecritical as many of the disaster's victims lost their IDbracelets in the crush, he said.Iqbal said 46 Indonesian pilgrims died, while 10 wereinjured and 90 remain missing.Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, Indonesia's religious affairsminister, said in a statement yesterday that Indonesians didnot have free access to hospitals to search for those injured.Saudi officials have launched an investigation into thedisaster. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir has vowed thatif mistakes were made, those who made them would be heldaccountable.Iranian officials have suggested that the death toll inthe disaster was far higher, without providing anycorroboration.Alzahrani today said Saudi officials were investigatinghow a false statement with an incorrect, much-higher deathtoll similar to one offered by Iranian officials was publishedon a website linked to the Health Ministry's home page.Abdullah al-Ali, chief executive of the Kuwait-basedelectronic security firm Cyberkov, said he couldn'timmediately tell whether the false statement came from acyberattack.However, he said Saudi Arabia's official internet spacerecently had been defaced or changed by politically activehackers angered by the case of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who wassentenced to death over charges he was convicted of at the ageof 18.Al-Nimr's uncle is the revered Saudi Shiite cleric Nimral-Nimr, a vocal government critic who also has been sentencedto death, for leading protests in the kingdom in 2011.Pakistan's Supreme Court meanwhile said it received acitizen's petition asking it to open an investigation into thehajj disaster. So far, no hearing has been set. Pakistan'sReligious Affairs Ministry said at least 44 Pakistani pilgrimsdied at Mina, while 35 were injured.Egypt's Minister of Religious Endowments Mohammed MokhtarGomaa told the state-run Middle East News Agency that 74Egyptian citizens are among the dead at Mina, while 98 remainmissing.The hajj this year drew some 2 million pilgrims from 180countries, though in recent years it has drawn more than 3million without any major incidents. Able-bodied Muslims arerequired to perform the five-day pilgrimage once in theirlifetime, and each year the hajj poses a massive logisticalchallenge for the kingdom.AP