Indonesia criticizes Saudi Arabia's hajj stampede disaster response

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesia on Tuesday criticized Saudi Arabia's slow response to the hajj pilgrimage disaster near Mecca, saying its diplomats only received full access to the dead and injured days after the crush of pilgrims that killed hundreds of people.

The criticism from Indonesia, the Muslim world's most populous country, comes as its officials, as well as those in India and Pakistan, say that Saudi officials gave foreign diplomats some 1,100 pictures of those killed in Thursday's disaster.

The Saudi Health Ministry's latest figures, released Saturday, put the toll at 769 people killed and 934 injured in the stampede. Faisal Alzahrani, the Health Ministry's general director of communications, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that this figure remained accurate. He said the Interior Ministry was handling the identification of the dead.

Alzahrani said civil defence authorities would be responsible for announcing any new death toll, though most recently they relied on Health Ministry statistics. Civil defence officials could not be immediately reached.

Indonesia, meanwhile, has complained that Saudi authorities only granted its diplomats full access to the dead on Monday night, four days after the disaster. That included seeing forensic records like fingerprints, said Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, an official in Indonesia's Foreign Ministry. Those fingerprints may prove critical as many of the disaster's victims lost their ID bracelets in the crush, he said.

Iqbal said 46 Indonesian pilgrims died, while 10 were injured and 90 remain missing.

Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, Indonesia's religious affairs minister, said in a statement Monday that Indonesians did not have free access to hospitals to search for those injured.

"The Saudi Arabian government has its own regulation, tradition, culture and procedures in dealing with such cases," Saifuddin said from Mecca. "This has not allowed us enough freedom in our effort to identify" the victims.

Saudi authorities have said that the disaster began when two large waves of pilgrims converged on a narrow road last Thursday during the final days of the annual hajj in Mina, near the holy city of Mecca. Survivors say the crowding caused people to suffocate and eventually trample one another in the worst disaster to befall the annual pilgrimage in a quarter-century.

Iran, Saudi Arabia's regional Shiite archrival, has criticized the Sunni kingdom over the hajj disaster and daily protests have taken place near the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. The disaster killed at least 239 Iranian pilgrims, while 241 remain missing, state television reported.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who criticized Saudi Arabia at the U.N. General Assembly on Monday for what he called its "incompetence and mismanagement" of the hajj, cancelled his planned events in New York on Tuesday to return home.

"Saudi Arabia should carry out its legal and international obligations toward foreign citizens and pilgrims," Rouhani said on arrival at Tehran's Mehrabad International Airport. "The incident should be fully investigated to see how it happened and what caused it."

Saudi officials have launched an investigation into the disaster. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir also has vowed that if mistakes were made, those who made them would be held accountable.

Iranian officials have suggested that the death toll in the disaster was far higher, without providing any corroboration.

On Tuesday, Alzahrani said Saudi officials were investigating how a false statement with an incorrect, much-higher death toll similar to one offered by Iranian officials was published on a website linked to the Heath Ministry's home page.

Abdullah al-Ali, chief executive of the Kuwait-based electronic security firm Cyberkov, said he couldn't immediately tell whether the false statement came from a cyberattack. However, he said Saudi Arabia's official Internet space recently had been defaced or changed by politically active hackers angered by the case of Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who was sentenced to death over charges he was convicted of at the age of 18.

Al-Nimr's uncle is the revered Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a vocal government critic who also has been sentenced to death, for leading protests in the kingdom in 2011.

Pakistan's Supreme Court meanwhile said it received a citizen's petition asking it to open an investigation into the hajj disaster. So far, no hearing has been set. Pakistan's Religious Affairs Ministry said at least 44 Pakistani pilgrims died at Mina, while 35 were injured.

Egypt's Minister of Religious Endowments Mohammed Mokhtar Gomaa told the state-run Middle East News Agency that 74 Egyptian citizens are among the dead at Mina, while 98 remain missing.

The hajj this year drew some 2 million pilgrims from 180 countries, though in recent years it has drawn more than 3 million without any major incidents. Able-bodied Muslims are required to perform the five-day pilgrimage once in their lifetime, and each year poses a massive logistical challenge for the kingdom.

This year also marked the first hajj overseen by King Salman, who holds the title of "custodian of the two holy mosques," which gives the monarchy great religious clout and prestige in the Muslim world.

But even before the hajj began, disaster struck Mecca as a tower construction crane crashed into the Grand Mosque on Sept. 11, killing at least 111 people.