As reported in the March 12 issue of Missions Insider three Christian workers were arrested in western Nepal in late February on suspicion of engaging in illegal religious activity simply because Bibles and Christian literature were found in their bags. Now Christian Aid has learned that five more Christians who went to visit the jailed brothers were similarly arrested.
Christian bus-passengers were singled out and killed by Islamic rebels in the southern Philippines, near Cotabato city, on Tuesday 18th March. Muslim rebels also planted a bomb near a cathedral in the city.
A Pakistani appeals court confirmed today the acquittal of two Christian brothers jailed nearly four years ago on charges of blasphemy. The two men had both been sentenced to 35 years in prison by a lower sessions court in May 2000.
A gospel worker and two local believers were arrested and jailed on proselytism charges in western Nepal last month. Details of the arrest were made known to Christian Aid just this week.
Kurdish Christian Ziwar Mohammed Ismaeel was shot dead in front of his taxi stand last month in Zakho, the northern-most city in the Kurdish safe-haven of Northern Iraq.
More than 100 persons died when a Muslim mob attacked a Christian community in western Nigeria’s Adamawa state apparently in retaliation for the deaths of 16 Muslims three months ago.
Presbyterian Christians are forced to meet secretly in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan as the authorities are increasing pressure on non Muslim groups, ASSIST News Service monitored Thursday March 13.
Amid growing pressure on Protestant congregations, two leaders of the unregistered Pentecostal church Living Stones have been arrested and given fifteen-day prison terms, Protestant sources in the Azerbaijani capital Baku have told Keston News Service. The two – Yusuf Farkhadov and Kasym Kasymov – were detained in Sumgait, a town close to Baku, when police and National Security Ministry officers raided a prayer meeting last Friday (18 January) held in a private flat in the town’s 9th micro-district. The two were given the two-week prison term under Article 310 of the Administrative Code, which punishes “petty hooliganism”. “All they were doing was praying,” one church member told Keston. They are serving their term in police detention cells in Sumgait.
The hearing in the case to liquidate the Love Baptist Church in the Azerbaijani capital Baku was postponed yesterday (23 January), the church’s pastor Sary Mirzoyev told Keston News Service from Baku. The Narimanov district court had been due to hear the suit, brought by Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, in the afternoon of 23 January (see KNS 18 January 2002) but the court agreed to the defendant’s request to postpone the hearing because of ill health. Yahya Mamedov, the church’s deacon and administrator, suffers from diabetes. No date has yet been set for a new hearing, but it is likely to be in about ten days’ time.
Sary Mirzoyev, pastor of the Love Baptist Church in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, has told Keston News Service that he will fight attempts next week to liquidate his church as a legal entity. The hearing in the liquidation suit, brought by Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, begins on 23 January at the court of Baku’s Narimanov district. Aliev is alleging that Pastor Mirzoyev preached against Islam and that therefore the church has violated the country’s religion law and should be liquidated. “They have alleged that we are arousing religious hatred,” Pastor Mirzoyev told Keston from Baku on 18 January. “I said nothing against Islam or against Muslims.”
Turkmenistan’s most prominent religious prisoner, the Baptist Shageldy Atakov, has been freed before the end of his four-year sentence, Keston News Service has learnt. The US-based Russian Evangelistic Ministries and the German-based Friedensstimme Mission, which maintain close ties with Baptists in the former Soviet republics, have both confirmed that Atakov was released from prison in the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk) early on 8 January and has now been reunited with his wife Artygul and five children in the town of Kaakhka close to Turkmenistan’s southern border with Iran. “Jesus has given me a Christmas gift,” Atakov was quoted as saying (many Christians in the region celebrate Christmas on 7 January).
ISTANBUL, January 30 (Compass) — A Sudanese convert to Christianity was refused permission to board a flight to Uganda this morning at the Khartoum airport, where state security police said their computers identified him as a criminal.
NEW DELHI, October 26 (Compass) — Christian leaders planning to attend a large anti-caste system “conversion” rally in New Delhi on November 4 are bracing for a Hindu extremist backlash.
WACO, Texas (Compass) — Imprisoned Christian aid workers Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were freed from Afghanistan’s Taliban as the country fell, city by city, to opposition forces. But a homecoming worship service showed they haven’t forgotten believers still in captivity.
Fourteen Christians, including three children, have been brutally killed in an attack on a Christian village in the southern Philippines by Islamic separatists.
Terrorists apparently have stepped up their attacks on Mindanao Island in southern Philippines.
“Prayer is everything! God brought us safely from Baghdad to Mosul/Dohuk and the many small Assyrian Christian villages in the north of Iraq,” writes Ken Joseph of a recent visit to northern Iraq.
Evangelical church leaders Kiros Meles and Abebayeh Desalegn walked free today after being jailed without charges for 10 months in the northern Ethiopian town of Maychew.
Washington, DC (ACLJ) — The American Center for Law and Justice, an international public interest law firm, today announced in a report just released that a simple majority in the U.S. Senate – 51 Senators – could act immediately to end filibusters in the Senate over two of President Bush’s nominees and move those nominations to the full Senate for a vote.
(Voice of the Martyrs) — A Chinese house church leader is on the run from Public Security Bureau officers after his church was raided February 9.