GROZNY, September 16. /ITAR-TASS/. First group of Chechen hajjis left Grozny airport for Saudi Arabia overnight to Tuesday, Ramzan Kadyrov, the President of the Chechen Republic tweeted.

“During many decades, not a single resident of Chechnya could see the Kaaba or visit Mecca and Medina,” he said. “And now thousands of Moslems make the Hajj and the Umrat (smaller hajj) and dozens of them have entered the Holy Kaaba.”

“Huge preparatory work was done at my instruction this year so as to be able to make direct flights from Grozny to Saudi Arabia, to accommodate the hajjis at comfortable hotels near Masjid al-Haram - the Sacred Mosque in Mecca - and to make the travel expenses reasonably low,” Kadyrov said, adding that these measures had helped cut down the cost of each trip by a thousand US dollars on the average and to raise the quality of services.

He congratulated the Moslem believers on the occasion of the trip and wished them every success.

All in all, some 2,600 residents of Chechnya had an opportunity to go on hajj this year. Direct flights from Grozny to Jeddah will be made through to September 24.

In 2013, the number of hajjis from Chechnya stood at 2,920 people.

The hajj is one of the five major deeds in Islam. It presupposes that each believer who has the physical and financial capability to make pilgrimage to the shrines in Mecca and Medina should do so at least once in a lifetime.

The hajj is made at the end of the holy month Ramadan and is crowned with the festival of Eid ul-Fitr, known as Kurban Bairman in the Turkic-speaking world.

Kurban Bairam falls on October 4 this year.