NEWS
July 3, 1990 | From Associated Press
About 1,400 Muslim pilgrims suffocated or were trampled to death Monday in a stampede in a pedestrian tunnel leading to the holy city of Mecca, witnesses and diplomats said. They said the stampede began when some pilgrims stopped in the middle of the air-conditioned tunnel and there was a crush as people outside pushed forward to escape the 112-degree heat. They also said the ventilation in the tunnel then appeared to have stopped.
NEWS
July 4, 1990 | From Associated Press
A frantic stampede that killed more than 1,400 Muslim pilgrims inside a pedestrian tunnel was prompted by the tumbling of seven people from a bridge leading to the tunnel, Saudi Arabia's interior minister said Tuesday. Prince Nayif ibn Abdulaziz put the death toll at 1,426, making it the worst pilgrimage tragedy in recent history. Reporters were barred from the General Hospital at Mina, the tent city connected by the tunnel to Mecca.
NEWS
March 18, 2000 | From Reuters
Hundreds of thousands of Muslim pilgrims in Saudi Arabia on Friday threw pebbles at three pillars in a ritual symbolizing the stoning of the devil on the eve of the end of a disaster-free hajj season. The pilgrims, many of whom had slept in the open air or in fire-resistant tents, packed the mile-long Jamarat bridge in Mena and pelted the pillars with pebbles to chants of "God Is Greatest!" Today is the fifth and last day of the hajj.
NEWS
July 25, 1988
Thousands of Muslims on the annual pilgrimage to Islam's holiest shrines ritually slaughtered sheep on a plain in Saudi Arabia to commemorate Abraham's offer to sacrifice his son to God. The ritual marked the end of the hajj, or pilgrimage, and the start of the four-day Eid al Adha, or Feast of Sacrifice, which is observed by about 850 million Muslims worldwide. More than 1 million Muslims--including about 1,000 from the United States--came to Mecca for the observance.
NEWS
August 6, 1987 | CHARLES P. WALLACE, Times Staff Writer
As the first Iranian bodies from the fighting in Mecca last week arrived in Tehran on Wednesday, regional specialists and Western diplomats in the Persian Gulf area warned that the violence and ensuing rise in tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia appear to have caused a significant deepening of the historic antagonisms between the two major sects of Islam.
NEWS
August 15, 1987 | From Reuters
Heavily armed Saudi Arabian security agents broke up an Iranian prayer meeting in the holy city of Medina on Thursday night, beating and arresting a number of pilgrims, Tehran radio charged Friday. The broadcast, monitored in Nicosia, gave no other details of the incident but said Iran's chief official at the pilgrimage, Mehdi Karroubi, had been barred from the city.