Chinese house church leader Li Dexian was detained by police on Tuesday morning and released the same evening without harm. The Protestant evangelist was arrested by Public Security Bureau officers at his weekly 10 a.m. Bible study in Huadu near Guangzhou for the 11th time since October, a source in Hong Kong told Newsroom.
KADUNA, Nigeria, 13 March 2000 (Newsroom) — About 300 Christians of the Kabe ethnic group in the city of Kaduna were abducted and forced to renounce their faith by their Muslim captors during religious clashes in the state last month, according to a human rights group.
Baptists in Turkmenistan fear that national security police are following through with a two-phase plan to deport missionaries and “strangle the remaining Christians in the country,” the Keston News Service reported. Church members claim that officers of the KNB (formerly KGB) issued that threat following a raid on a church in the capital Ashgabad last year.
About 300 Christians of the Kabe ethnic group in the city of Kaduna were abducted and forced to renounce their faith by their Muslim captors during religious clashes in the state last month, according to a human rights group.
A Baptist leader who had been held in prison by Turkmenistan’s secret police (KNB) since February 2 was deported from the Central Asian state yesterday.
KADUNA, NIGERIA (March 8, 2000) (Assist Communications) — An Open Doors co-worker has provided a harrowing eyewitness report from violence-torn Kaduna, Nigeria, following a recent clash between Christians and Muslims. The fierce fighting resulted in more than 300 deaths as Muslim youths attacked Christians protesting the adoption of Sharia (Islamic law) in the state.
NAIROBI, Kenya, 8 March 2000 — “Religion is the most powerful philosophy in development,” a World Bank official told Newsroom at a conference focusing on poverty in Africa here this week.
Two Turkish Christians arrested March 1 while selling and distributing Christian literature near the southern port city of Izmir were refused bail today, pending a court hearing scheduled for March 30.
GOLAN HEIGHTS, 6 March 2000 (Newsroom) — Orthodox Rabbis and evangelical Protestants are among the leaders of a biblically based campaign to prevent Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s government from transferring the Golan Heights to Syria. Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, supported that stance on March 1 with approval of the first reading of a bill that would require a special majority in a referendum on ceding territory.
A Christian Uzbek pastor jailed since February 1999 on contrived fraud charges is being subjected to physical beatings for witnessing to his cellmates, church sources in the Central Asian republic reported in early March.