Pilgrim deaths in Mecca put spotlight on underworld haj industry

CAIRO – The

deaths of more than 1,000 pilgrims in Saudi Arabia for the haj

have put a spotlight on an underworld of illicit tour operators, smugglers and swindlers who profit off Muslims desperate to meet their religious duty to travel to Mecca.

While registered pilgrims are transported around the shrines in air-conditioned buses and rest in air-conditioned tents, undocumented ones are often exposed to the elements, making them more vulnerable to extreme heat. Some pilgrims in 2024 described watching people faint, and passing bodies in the street, as temperatures hit 49 deg C or higher.

In an interview on state television on June 23, Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said that 83 per cent of the more than 1,300 deaths occurred among pilgrims who had not had official permits.

“The rise in temperatures during the haj season represented a big challenge this year,” he said. “Unfortunately – and this is painful for all of us – those who didn’t have haj permits walked long distances under the sun.”

Mr Al-Jalajel’s remarks came after days of silence from the Saudi authorities over the fatalities during the haj, an arduous and deeply spiritual ritual that capable Muslims are encouraged to perform in their lifetime.

With nearly two million pilgrims participating each year, many of them elderly or ailing, it is not unusual for people to die from heat stress, illness or chronic disease, and Saudi Arabia does not regularly report those statistics. So it is unclear if the number of deaths in 2024 was unusual.

In 2023, 774 pilgrims from Indonesia alone died, and in 1985, more than 1,700 people died around the holy sites, most of them from heat stress, a study at the time found.

But because so many of the pilgrims who died this year were performing the pilgrimage without official documentation, their deaths exposed the underworld of unlicensed tour operators, smugglers and swindlers who take advantage of pilgrims desperate to perform the haj, helping them evade the regulations.

“There’s so much greed around this business,” said Ms Iman Ahmed, co-owner of El-Iman Tours in Cairo.

Ms Ahmed said she refused to send unregistered pilgrims on haj packages but that other Egyptian tour operators and Saudi brokers made big money doing so. NYTIMES