The 1987 Mecca incident was a clash between Shia pilgrim demonstrators and the Saudi Arabian security forces, during the Hajj pilgrimage; it occurred in Mecca on 31 July 1987 and led to the deaths of over 400 people. The event has been variously described as a "riot" or a "massacre". It arose from escalating tensions between Shia Iran and Wahabbi Saudi Arabia. Since 1981, Iranian pilgrims had held an annual political demonstration against Israel and the United States, but in 1987, a cordon of Saudi police and the Saudi Arabian National Guard had sealed part of the planned demonstration route, leading to a confrontation between them and the pilgrims. This escalated into a violent clash, followed by a deadly stampede. There is a controversy regarding the details of the incident, with both Iran and Saudi Arabia laying much of the blame on the other side. Some sources claim the death toll from the incident was 402 people: 275 Iranian pilgrims, 85 Saudi police, and 42 pilgrims from other nationalities. Other sources claim that more than 400 pilgrims had died, and thousands more injured. After the incident, Iranians attacked the Saudi, Kuwaiti and French Embassies, abducting four Saudis from the embassy.
There have been incidents during the Hajj', the Muslim pilgrimage to the city of Mecca, that have caused loss of life. Every follower of Islam is required to visit Mecca during the Hajj at least once in his or her lifetime, if able to do so; according to Islam, the pilgrimage is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. During the month of the Hajj, Mecca must cope with as many as three million pilgrims.
The 2006 Hajj stampede resulted in the deaths of at least 364 pilgrims on 12 January 2006 during the Hajj in Mecca.
Mina is a neighborhood of Mecca in Makkah Province, in western Saudi Arabia. It is situated 5 kilometres to the east of the Holy city of Mecca, and stands on the road from Mecca's city centre to the Hill of Arafat. It covers an area of approximately 20 km².
A stampede is uncontrolled concerted running as an act of mass impulse among herd animals or a crowd of people in which the group collectively begins running, often in an attempt to escape a perceived threat.
The 2009 Saudi Arabian floods affected Jeddah, on the Red Sea (western) coast of Saudi Arabia, and other areas of Makkah Province. They have been described by civil defence officials as the worst in 27 years. As of 3 January 2010, some 122 people had been reported to have been killed, and more than 350 were missing. Some roads were under a meter of water on 26 November, and many of the victims were believed to have drowned in their cars. At least 3,000 vehicles were swept away or damaged. The death toll was expected to rise as flood waters receded, allowing rescuers to reach stranded vehicles.
The Mecca fire of 1997 was a fire that occurred in the tent city near Mecca in Saudi Arabia 15 April 1997, killing between 217 and 300 people.
The History of the Hajj is not clear as there is no evidence of its existence in its current practice until the start of Islam in the mid 7th century. Islamic writers claim it started from the time of Abraham through the establishment of the Islamic Hajj by Islamic prophet Muhammad, to the present-day hajj where millions of Muslims perform their pilgrimage annually. In Islamic tradition, pilgrimage was introduced during the time of prophet Ibrahim (Abraham). Upon God's command, he built Kaaba which became the destination of pilgrimage. For the pagan Arabs in the Pre-Islamic Arabia, Kaaba was still the center of their worshiping. The present pattern of the Islamic Hajj was established by Prophet Muhammad, around 632 CE, who made reforms to the pre-Islamic pilgrimage of the pagan Arabs. During the medieval times, pilgrims would gather in chief cities like Basra, Damascus, and Cairo to go to Mecca in groups and caravans comprising tens of thousands of pilgrims.
On 11 September 2015, a crawler crane toppled over onto the Masjid al-Haram, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killing 111 people and injuring 394. The city was preparing for the Hajj pilgrimage.
On 24 September 2015 an event described as a "crush and stampede" caused deaths estimated at well over 2,000 pilgrims, suffocated or crushed during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mina, Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The high number of deaths caused by the disaster make it the deadliest Hajj disaster in history. Estimates of the number of dead vary; the Associated Press reported 2,411 dead, while Agence France-Presse reported 2,236 killed. Based on the total of the individual national reports cited in the table below, at least 2,431 people died. The government of Saudi Arabia officially reported two days after the event that there had been 769 deaths and 934 injured. These figures remained official at the time of the following year's hajj and were never updated. The largest number of victims was from Iran, followed by Mali and Nigeria.
On 2 July 1990, an incident occurred during the Hajj in which 1,426 people were suffocated and trampled to death in a tunnel near Mecca. Until the 2015 Mina stampede, this incident had the highest death toll of any Hajj tragedy in modern times.
Mohsen Haji Hassani Kargar (1988–2015) was an Iranian Qari . He had won a world Qira'at competition in June 2015 in Malaysia. He was among the missing Iranian Hajj pilgrims in Hajj rites incident in Mina, near the Saudi city of Makkah on September 24.
The 2004 Hajj stampede resulted in the deaths of at least 251 pilgrims on 1 February 2004 during the Hajj in Mecca.
Bilkisu Yusuf, also known as Hajiya Bilkisu Yusuf,, was a Nigerian journalist, columnist and editor for prominent newspapers in Abuja, Kano and Kaduna, Nigeria. She is known in Nigeria for being the first woman to direct a national newspaper operation and served as editor for two more. She was a Hausa, Muslim, feminist, and advocate for interfaith society, who was known for being an adviser to the Nigerian President on International Affairs and the founding of NGOs, such as Women In Nigeria (WIN) and the Federation of Muslim Women's Association (FOMWAN). Yusuf was killed in the 2015 Mina stampede while on Haj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
