98 Indians Died During Hajj Pilgrimage This Year Due To Natural Causes: MEA

The external affairs ministry on Friday said that 98 Indians died during the Hajj pilgrimage this year. “This year, 175000 Indian pilgrims visited Mecca for Hajj. The Hajj period is from May 9 to July 22. This year, till now, 98 deaths have been reported,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said, during the weekly press briefing.

“Six people died on the Day of Arafat and 4 were accident-related deaths. Last year, total deaths in the entire Hajj period were 187. Every year a large number of pilgrims from India attend Haj, and some of them unfortunately pass away during the Hajj period,” he further added.

“The deaths have been due to natural causes, chronic illnesses, and old age,” Jaiswal said.

One list circulating online, accessed by the Associated Press suggested at least 550 people died during the five-day Hajj, citing a medic, who further added that the names listed appeared genuine.

That medic and another official told the news agency that they believed at least 600 bodies were at the Emergency Complex in Al-Muaisem neighbourhood in Mecca.

“(I) saw a lot of people collapsing to the ground unconscious,” Khalid Bashir Bazaz, an Indian pilgrim, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

Deaths are not uncommon at the Hajj, which has seen at times over 2 million people travel to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has not commented on the death toll amid the heat during the pilgrimage.

Several countries have said some of their pilgrims died because of the heat that swept across the holy sites at Mecca, including Jordan and Tunisia.

Temperatures on Tuesday reached 47°C in Mecca and the sacred sites in and around the city, according to the Saudi National Center for Meteorology. Some people also fainted while trying to perform the symbolic stoning of the devil.

A 2019 study by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that even if the world succeeds in mitigating the worst effects of climate change, the Hajj would be held in temperatures exceeding an “extreme danger threshold” from 2047 to 2052, and from 2079 to 2086.

Islam follows a lunar calendar, so the Hajj falls around 11 days earlier each year. By 2029, the Hajj will occur in April, and in the next several years after that it will fall in the winter, when temperatures are milder.