As officials fall short, volunteers lead the search for missing pilgrims

Families of the victims of a catastrophic stampede in Mecca last week are decrying the lack of state support as they try to find their loved ones, saying that they’re relying on civilian initiatives for help.

The number of Egyptians who died in the tragic incident has now climbed to 124, with at least 72 people still missing, officials said in a press conference Thursday, but some say the number could be much higher.

The stampede occured last week on the last day of hajj. Two waves of pilgrims came head to head in the Mena area, where a ritual symbolic stoning of the devil is held. Official Saudi statistics put the death toll at 717, while unofficial sources said that it has surpassed 1,000.

Endowments Minister Mokhtar Gomaa said the Egyptian consulate in Jedda and the official Egyptian convoy are working together to find the missing people.

But Hesham Salah al-Din told Mada Masr that his family has been depending on friends in Saudi Arabia to search for his uncle, 56-year-old university professor Mohsen Negm al-Din, who went to Mecca to perform hajj and has been missing since the stampede.

Salah al-Din says that the family’s repeated requests for information from the Saudi Embassy in Cairo have only been met with assurances and no real assistance.

“They are merely offering us words of condolences and support, nothing more,” he said. “I don’t know why they are doing this. We just want them to give him some attention, at least to tell us that he’s dead. They can’t just leave us in the dark like that.”

Mada Masr reached out to the Saudi Embassy in Cairo for comment, but received no response.

Other than releasing periodic updates on the death toll, which he doesn’t trust, the Egyptian authorities have also not been of much help, Salah al-Din asserts.

The most useful resource for his family has been Facebook. Egyptians living in Saudi Arabia have created several online groups to help families locate their missing loved ones.

The Facebook groups, most notably Egyptian Youth Volunteers in Mecca and the Egyptian Community in Saudi Arabia, are large, volunteer-based operations seeking to reunite families back in Egypt with their missing relatives.

The volunteers have been visiting hospitals in Mecca, compiling lists of deceased and injured Egyptian pilgrims, and photographing bodies of the deceased as well as survivors for families to identify. The groups also publish calls for help from families of missing pilgrims.

In a recent concrete, but much-delayed step to help the families of missing pilgrims, on Friday Health Minister Ahmed Rady instructed them to head to the Nasser Institute next Monday to deposit DNA samples to be compared to samples taken from bodies in Saudi.

In a Facebook post, the Egyptian Youth Volunteers in Mecca group criticized the Egyptian convoy for failing to effectively deal with the crisis.

According to the group’s statement, officials did not set up a central operations room or dispatch emergency medical teams. The group also asserted that the convoy is radically underestimating the number of victims in the tragedy.

The statement then noted the several bureaucratic hurdles that hinder the volunteers' work, including the refusal of Saudi health authorities to give them information, and the refusal of some hospitals to let them enter to identify bodies. One volunteer complained that the group was unable to go through the process of reclaiming a body and burying it, even after identification by a family member, because Egyptian embassy officials were not present.