The Ministry of Haj will set up female units and divisions in private buildings in four months, according to Haj Minister Bandar Hajjar.

Hajjar said Sunday that the ministry has begun the construction of female units in Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah. The buildings will have two entrances and two exits.

He said that the female units will fall under a separate budget category.

When asked about the possibility of increasing Haj quotas for some countries, he said that the ministry never made any promises to any Haj business to allow more pilgrims in the following years.

“The established quota is 1,000 pilgrims for each million of the country’s inhabitants,” Hajjar said. “This decision was part of a resolution adopted during a meeting by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1980. This year we had to bring this number down by 20 percent. We reached this decision by working in cooperation with the various authorities concerned with the affairs of Haj and Umrah.”

“The delays in last year’s season were due to the existence of new development projects to serve the worshippers, which were completed in record time,” he said. “We will be utilizing new spaces that became available after some government agencies left the area because their work in not related to Haj. The new allocations would accommodate 104,000 pilgrims.”

As for the lawsuits filed against the ministry by various Haj and Umrah companies as a result of the ministry’s decision to disband boards of directors of a number of companies, he said that “these cases are being reviewed.”

“Whenever we take a decision to disband a company’s board of directors, we do that in order to protect the public interest,” he said. “We had to make decisions like these after we noticed certain violations, which at the end of the day are in the public interest.”