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mid slow progress in the identification of victims from the Mina stampede in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, a report from the Religious Affairs Ministry has confirmed that the number of Indonesians who died in the haj tragedy spiked from 59 on Thursday to 91 on Friday.

Ministry spokesperson Urip Rudi Subiantoro announced 32 more victims from Thursday'€™s stampede in Mina. Thirty-one of them were in the country for haj, while the other was an Indonesian residing in Mecca.

'€œAs of today [Friday], there are 91 deaths comprising 86 Indonesian pilgrims while the rest were Indonesian nationals residing in Saudi Arabia,'€ Rudi said on Friday, confirming the statement from the ministry'€™s Mecca office.

Separately, the Foreign Ministry'€™s director for the protection of Indonesian nationals and entities abroad, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, said that an inter-departmental team from the Indonesian government was still searching for 38 Indonesian pilgrims who had yet to return to their lodgings since Thursday'€™s tragedy.

The Mina stampede took place at a crossroads on Street 204 '€” one of the two main arteries leading through the camp at Mina to Jamarat, the site where pilgrims ritually stone the devil by hurling pebbles at three large pillars.

An Associated Press count based on official figures from countries around the world revealed that the stampede was likely to have killed more than a thousand people and injured hundreds more, making it the deadliest haj-related incident in 25 years.

In 1990, 1,426 pilgrims died in a similar incident inside a Mecca pedestrian tunnel. Both stampedes occurred on Idul Adha (the Muslim Day of Sacrifice), one of Islam'€™s most important religious celebrations.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the Indonesian government sent a team of homegrown specialists to help speed up victim identification.

The National Police sent their Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) team to Mina on Friday following a request by Indonesian government officials.

Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said in a recent press briefing in New York, US, that she had asked the police chief to prepare a 10-member team to provide assistance to the local authorities.

Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin confirmed the move in Jeddah on Friday and said that the Saudi administration had given the green-light to the DVI team to get involved in the forensics process.

'€œI was told by the Foreign Minister and her deputy that the Saudi government had agreed to meet our request to involve the DVI team,'€ Lukman said on Thursday, local time, as quoted on the ministry'€™s website.

The DVI'€™s executive director, Sr. Comr. Anton Castilani said that the team was set to leave for Mina on Thursday evening but could not do so as their visas were still being processed at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Jakarta.

'€œThe DVI team'€™s plan to leave is based on the visa application process. We estimate that the team will leave tonight and the team will be lead by Sr. Comr. Mas'€™udi, a former police attache of the Indonesian Embassy in Riyadh,'€ he said on Friday.

Anton said that the team would comprise one leader, four forensic experts, two forensic odontology experts, one forensics DNA expert and two experts from the police force'€™s Indonesia Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (INAFIS).

He added that once the DVI team arrived in Mina, they would join with other forensics teams assigned to help hasten the identification of hundreds of victims. Anton explained that Indonesia'€™s DVI team would not be limited to just identifying Indonesian victims.

'€œWe will help identify all of them, we can'€™t pick and choose because the bodies are all mixed up,'€ he said.