50,000 Iranian Hajj Pilgrims in Saud Arabia
According to the organization’s public relations office, Ali Reza Rashidian said the majority of them have traveled to the Arab country’s Medina and Jeddah airports via Iran Air flights.
He added that 81,732 Iranian pilgrims have so far received visas for attending the Hajj.
The last group of pilgrims will leave the cities of Tehran, Mashhad and Tabriz on July 31.
Nearly 86,000 Iranians will make the Hajj pilgrimage this year. Hajj is tentatively scheduled to take place between August 8 and 14.
Iran sent 86,000 pilgrims to Saudi Arabia for Hajj in 2018. In 2017 some 85,000 Iranians made the pilgrimage.
A year earlier, more than 1.8 million pilgrims attended Hajj but Iranians stayed at home after tensions between Riyadh and Tehran boiled over following a deadly crush of people during the 2015 pilgrimage.
On September 24, 2015, thousands of people lost their lives in the deadly crush after Saudi authorities blocked a road in Mina during a ritual, forcing large crowds of pilgrims to collide.
The crush was the deadliest incident in the history of the pilgrimage. According to an Associated Press count based on official statements from the 36 countries that lost citizens in the disaster, more than 2,400 pilgrims were killed in the incident.
Saudi Arabia claims nearly 770 people were killed, but officials at Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization say about 4,700 people, including over 460 Iranian pilgrims, lost their lives.
