Death toll in crane accident at Grand Mosque in Mecca rises to 87: Saudi civil defence

Riyadh: At least 87 people were killed and 154 injured when a construction crane crashed into the Grand Mosque of Saudi Arabia’s holy Muslim city of Mecca Friday, authorities said.

Pictures circulating on social media showed bloodied bodies strewn across a courtyard where the top part of the crane, which appeared to have collapsed or snapped, had crashed.
The civil defence authority, which gave the casualty figures, said on Twitter that emergency teams were sent to the scene after a “crane fell at the Grand Mosque”.

That came about an hour after it tweeted that Mecca was “witnessing medium to heavy rains”. The incident occurred as hundreds of thousands of Muslims were gathering from all over the world for the annual Haj pilgrimage set to begin later this month.

The Grand Mosque is usually crowded on Fridays, the Muslim weekly day of prayer. It houses the Kaaba — the massive cube-shaped structure towards which Muslims worldwide look and pray. Governor of Mecca region Prince Khaled al-Faisal has ordered an investigation into the incident.

A massive project is underway to increase the area of the mosque by 400,000 square metres allowing it to accommodate up to 2.2 million pilgrims at a time.