Death by pilgrimage

The New York Times says that most of the heat exhaustion deaths in Mecca this year were unregistered pilgrims.  The report is quite interesting (gift linked for you):

The deaths of more than a thousand pilgrims in Saudi Arabia for the hajj have put a spotlight on an underworld of illicit tour operators, smugglers and swindlers who profit off Muslims desperate to meet their religious duty to travel to Mecca.

While registered pilgrims are transported around the shrines in air-conditioned buses and rest in air-conditioned tents, undocumented ones are often exposed to the elements, making them more vulnerable to extreme heat. Some pilgrims this year described watching people faint and passing bodies in the street as temperatures hit 120 degrees or higher.

On Sunday, in an interview on state television, the Saudi health minister, Fahd al-Jalajel, said that 83 percent of the more than 1,300 deaths occurred among pilgrims who had not had official permits.

“The rise in temperatures during the hajj season represented a big challenge this year,” he said. “Unfortunately — and this is painful for all of us — those who didn’t have hajj permits walked long distances under the sun.”

I didn't realise so many had died in other recent years:

With nearly two million pilgrims participating each year, many of them elderly or ailing, it is not unusual for people to die from heat stress, illness or chronic disease, and Saudi Arabia does not regularly report those statistics. So it is unclear if the number of deaths this year was unusual. Last year, 774 pilgrims died from Indonesia alone, and in 1985, more than 1,700 people died around the holy sites, most of them from heat stress, a study at the time found.

But because so many of the pilgrims who died this year were performing the pilgrimage without official documentation, their deaths exposed the underworld of unlicensed tour operators, smugglers and swindlers who take advantage of pilgrims desperate to perform the hajj, helping them evade the regulations.

Further down:

In interviews with The New York Times, hajj tour operators, pilgrims and relatives of the dead said the number of undocumented pilgrims appeared to have been driven up by rising economic desperation in countries like Egypt and Jordan. An official hajj package can cost more than $5,000 or $10,000, depending on a pilgrim’s country of origin — far beyond the means of many hoping to make the trip.

But they also described easily exploited loopholes in Saudi Arabia’s regulations that allowed undocumented pilgrims to travel to the kingdom with a tourist or visitor visa several weeks ahead of hajj. Once they arrive, they find a network of illegal brokers and smugglers who offer their services, take their money and sometimes abandon them to fend for themselves, they said.

I would be very worried if I had an elderly parent attending.  Or any relative, actually.  On news reports, I've seen people say that it wasn't just the old dying on the street (and then their body being left there for some time.)