Saudi Arabia

Thousands protested in the streets of Tehran as a senior cleric angrily demanded Saudi Arabia hand over control of the annual pilgrimage to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the world's largest body of Muslim nations.

At least 863 pilgrims were injured in the crush, said the Saudi civil defense directorate, which provided the death toll. The tragedy struck as Muslims around the world marked the start of the Eid al-Adha holiday.

It was the second major disaster during this year's hajj season, raising questions about the adequacy of measures put in place by Saudi authorities to ensure the safety of the roughly 2 million Muslims taking part. A crane collapse in Mecca nearly two weeks earlier left 111 people dead.

It is one of the world's largest religious pilgrimages that draws people from different countries to the holy city of Mecca to perform a series of rituals and prayers aimed at erasing past sins.

The early morning blaze happened in a residential compound known as Radium in the eastern city of Khobar. It is used by the state oil giant Saudi Aramco, which oversees petroleum production in the OPEC powerhouse.

The company said an investigation has begun into the cause of the fire.

The Saudi military destroyed the missile's launch pad inside Yemen, Saudi's official news agency said. It said the missile was in the Jizan region in southern Saudi Arabia when it was intercepted.

The Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, said in a statement the missile hit a power plant in Jizan.

The claims by the so-called Hijaz Province of the Islamic State appeared hours after Thursday's attack in the city of Abha, close to Saudi Arabia's southern border with war-torn Yemen.

It was carried on IS-affiliated Twitter accounts and was also reported by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant messages.

The statement says an IS suicide bomber targeted a "monument of the apostate".

The Interior Ministry's statement said 10 of those killed were members of the security forces. 

The state-owned Al-Ekhbariya news channel earlier gave a higher death toll, reporting that 17 had been killed in the attack. It was not immediately clear why there was a discrepancy, but conflicting reports are common in the chaotic aftermath of bombings.

Prince Mohammed Bin Nawaf Bin Abdel-Aziz, the Saudi ambassador to the United Kingdom, offered his condolences to the wealthy bin Laden family, which owns a major construction company in Saudi Arabia.

"The embassy will follow up on the incident and its circumstances with the concerned British authorities and work on speeding up the handover of the bodies of the victims to the kingdom for prayer and burial," the ambassador said in a statement tweeted by the embassy late Friday.

Adel al-Jubeir spoke Monday after talks with EU's Federica Mogherini who was in the kingdom to assuage its concerns over the nuclear deal she helped broker.

Al-Jubeir says Saudi Arabia rejects Iran's words and actions — a veiled reference to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's statement that the deal won't sway his country's support for the Lebanese Hezbollah group, Syria's government and Shiites in Bahrain and Yemen.