Mecca mosques wrongly aligned

Muslims are anxious about the validity of their prayers after it was discovered that 200 mosques in Islam's holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way.

All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like building in Mecca's Grand Mosque. But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.

There have been suggestions that laser beams could be used to make an exact measurement.