Karbala | Rescuers found the body of an eighth person on Monday evening in the rubble of a Shiite shrine in central Iraq, part of which collapsed after a landslide, and announced that they were ending their search for victims. victims.
• Read also: Four bodies removed from the rubble of a Shia shrine
In the evening, the Iraqi Civil Defense said it had extracted the body of an eighth victim – a woman – from the rubble of Imam Ali’s Qattarat, a shrine near the holy city of Karbala (center), whose part of the roof collapsed after a landslide on Saturday.
In total, the relief workers said in a press release that they had pulled out the remains of “eight people, including five women, two men and a child”, after “sixty hours of continuous work”.
Rescue operations “are now complete” and the sanctuary is now closed to the public, they added.
The landslide occurred on Saturday afternoon, when a portion of the rock face that surrounds the shrine fell off, sinking part of its roof.
“Two children and a teenager were rescued in the first hours” which followed the landslide, explained the Civil Defense.
According to its spokesman Nawas Sabah Shaker, the landslide is due to “high humidity” which separated part of the rock from the rest of the wall.
This landslide caused the collapse of “about 30% of the surface of the building of about 100 square meters”, he added.
Responsibilities
The tragedy caused considerable emotion in Iraq, whose population is predominantly Shia Muslim. But the controversy swells on the responsibilities.
“We want to know what happened, why it happened,” lamented AFP Bassem Khazali, a witness whose nephew died in the accident.
The essential Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr, accustomed to outbursts against the Iraqi government and its political adversaries, attacked the “corrupt” and “corruption which once again caused civilian victims” on Sunday evening.
Imam Ali’s Qattarat is located about 25 km west of the holy Shia city of Karbala and it attracts pilgrims by the thousands every year. It is dedicated to Imam Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and founding figure of Shia Islam.
Imam Ali would have stopped there with his army on his way to the Battle of Siffin in 657 and would have caused a source of water to gush there.
However, the Shiite Waqf – a religious institution that administers the property of the Shiite community in Iraq – claimed “not to manage” the sanctuary, nor the land on which it is built.
On Facebook, the governor of Kerbala, Nassif al-Khattabi indicated that “the shrine does not belong to a specific group, but to individuals who have been summoned”, without however specifying their identities, or which authorities intended to question them.