AT LEAST 87 people were killed and 184 injured when a construction crane crashed into the Grand Mosque of Saudi Arabia’s holy Muslim city of Mecca today, 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 into it.

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”.

Crowded

The incident occurred as hundreds of thousands of Muslims gather from all over the world for the annual hajj pilgrimage set to begin later this month.

The Grand Mosque is usually at its most crowded today, the Muslim weekly day of prayer.

It houses the Kaaba — the massive cube-shaped structure towards which Muslims worldwide pray.

The governor of Mecca region, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, has ordered an investigation into the incident.

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

800,000 pilgrims

The mosque is surrounded by a number of cranes.

The hajj has largely been incident-free during the past few years, with Saudi Arabia investing billions of dollars in transport and other infrastructure to facilitate the movement of the huge numbers of people who take part.

The official SPA news agency said in a statement that, almost 800,000 pilgrims had arrived into the kingdom for hajj.

- © AFP 2015.