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JAKARTA. Presidential Chief of Staff Teten Masduki has called on the Saudi Arabian government to give it more open access to the bodies of victims of Thursday’s haj stampede.
He said that the government is currently trying to identify Indonesian pilgrims killed during the incident in Mina, Saudi Arabia, but that the process was not running as smoothly as it should due to access issues.
“The government will keep asking the Saudi Arabian government to give us as wide access as possible to check and trace [the whereabouts of Indonesian haj pilgrims] at all hospitals,” he said as quoted by Antara news agency at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta on Monday.
Teten said the government had also asked Saudi authorities for greater access to information to help smooth the identification process. Once the process was completed, he said, the Religious Affairs Ministry would immediately provide certainty to the families of victims in Indonesia. The government was confident that Saudi Arabia would provide the best support it could in the identification process, he added.
Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Syaifuddin, who is currently in Saudi Arabia, is responsible for communications between the Indonesian government and local authorities and for providing periodic reports on the handling of the incident to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
The ministry’s director general of haj and umrah (minor haj) Abdul Djamil admitted that the Haj Management Committee (PPIH) was struggling to identify Indonesian citizens killed in the Mina tragedy. He said the PPIH needed more time for the identification process due to the large number of victims of the incident, who came from many different countries.
Djamil said the PPIH’s work was made difficult for the first two days after the incident because the Saudi Arabian government prevented outside authorities from seeing any initial data. Such limited access, he said, was because the Saudi government was still evacuating the scene and carrying out initial identification processes.
“We only got access to the mortuary at 11 p.m. local time on Friday,” said Djamil.
He added that it was quite difficult for PPIH personnel to carry out identification and data matching because the appearance of victim’s bodies in the pictures they were given was different to their appearance on the Computerized Integrated Haj System and the E-Haj system.
Djamil said many pictures obtained were not accompanied with the data needed to prove who the people were.
In its investigation process, the Religious Affairs Ministry team has divided the victims of the Mina tragedy into three categories: those deceased, those injured, and those still unaccounted for.
During the peak day of the haj pilgrimage on Thursday, a stampede killed approximately 769 pilgrims from various countries. Iran suffered the highest loss of citizens. At least 136 Iranian pilgrims died in the incident and more than 344 Iranians are still reported missing.
