Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi referred to the first anniversary of the bloody Hajj stampede in Mina during his first jurisprudence course of the new academic year, and said: “This tragedy was a unique occurrence in the history of Islam in which more than 7,000 believers in the state of ihram and while in the secure shrine of God while performing the divine Hajj rituals were martyred with thirsty lips.”
The renowned teaching in the Islamic Seminary said that the Mina tragedy pains the hearts of all people of the world, calling the Saudi regime “evil and accursed criminals.”
"One of the signs of the crimes of this sinister regime is the Saudi’s ban on pilgrims from Iranian, Syrian Yemeni and the pilgrims from several other countries," he added.
He added that Saudi Arabia has accused Iran of politicizing the Hajj and said, “Has Iran politicized the Hajj or is it the Saudis who have intertwined themselves in American politics? Is it Iran who has screamed over the politicization of the ‘disavowal of polytheism’ ritual? This is while the Quran explicitly mentions the disavowal of polytheism.”
The former Chief Justice of Iran proved the intentionality of the Saudi regime in the Mina tragedy and said that murder has three types – directly, where a person directly kills another person deliberately. “This is what this sinister regime did in 1987, where 275 Iranian pilgrims and killed by Saudi security forces,” he said.
He added that the second type is that man creates the preliminary steps toward murder. This is such that someone digs a pit for others to fall into and be killed.
Ayatollah Hashemi-Shahroudi said in explaining the third state, said this type of murder is when a person has a certain job to perform, but doesn’t perform it, like a mother who deliberately does not breastfeed her child and the child dies as a result.
“However, if we accept the Mina tragedy, it is certainly not the first of the three aforementioned types of murder because by blocking the path of the pilgrims, it would be the second type of murder and by refusing to help the victims of the incident, it is the third type of murder,” he said.