Top Security Official Sees Mina Tragedy as Al Saud's Slur

Rasa - The last year's tragic Mina incident is still a source of shame and disrepute for the Saudi regime, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani said, adding that the terrorists in the region take orders from the Riyadh government.

News ID: 423426

Date: 10 September 2016 - 19:08

RNA - "The Mina tragedy is a slur for Al Salman," Shamkhani said on Saturday.

He, meantime, pointed to the repetition of the Saudi claims against Iran, and said, "The Takfiris are soldiers of the Saudis; the Saudis are executing the regional policies of the Zionists."

The top security official pointed to the Saudi government's lack of commitment to the most basic and obvious human and legal principles to make up to the families of the Mina tragedy victims, and said, "We will continue to pursue (the materialization of) the rights of the families of Mina martyrs and brining the perpetrators of such crimes to justice by means of legal and international capacities."

On 24 September 2015, a crowd collapse caused the deaths of at least 7,000 pilgrims who were suffocated or crushed during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mina, Mecca, making it the deadliest Hajj disaster in history.

On Wednesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei blasted the silence of the international community and those countries which have lost their citizens in the 2015 Mina incident, and called for sending a fact-finding committee to Saudi Arabia to find the root causes of the painful death of over 7,000 Muslims.

"If they (the Saudis) are telling the truth and aren’t responsible for the incident, they should allow an Islamic-international fact-finding delegation to scrutinize the realities of the issue closely and clarify (the cause of) the incident," Ayatollah Khamenei said in Tehran on Wednesday in a meeting with family members of nearly 500 Iranian nationals killed in the last year Mina incident in Saudi Arabia.

"The Muslim Ummah (nation) experienced a great loss in the Mina incident, and 7,000 to 8,000 people were martyred, but no one showed a reaction in other countries but Iran, and they kept silent. This silence is a great calamity reigning over the Islamic nations and this is a disaster for the world of Islam," the Iranian leader said.

"The international bodies start hues and cries over animals' rights, but now several thousand people have lost their lives in an incident, and they are dead silent," Ayatollah Khamenei added.

Noting that "the evil, damned progeny of the Al-Saud is not qualified to administer the holy shrines", he blasted the Saudi rulers for refraining from extending even a verbal apology over the incident.

Ayatollah Khamenei stressed that the Iranian nation is bravely standing against the Saudi regime's ignorance and aberration, and said that the Saudis' inefficiency in managing the Hajj ceremony showed that they are not competent and qualified to administer the rituals and the holy shrines, and other nations and countries should also stand against them.

Noting that the hands of the supporters of the Saudi regime are also stained with the blood of those killed in the Mina incident, he said, "The shameless Saudi regime, supported by the US, is blatantly standing against the Muslims and it is shedding blood in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain and therefore, the US and other supporters of Riyadh are also accomplices to the Saudi crimes."

Ayatollah Khamenei underlined that most of those killed during the Mina incident were Sunni Muslims, among them many Sunni Iranians, and said despite the western states' propaganda, the Saudis don’t even support the Arab people.

"The reality is that the hated Saudis are a group within the Muslim world and some of them with and some of them without knowledge are doing enmity to the Muslims, and the Muslim world should stand against them and pronounce denouncement and hatred for the masters of the Saudis, that are the US and British devils," he added.

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