Five Pakistani Christians who were detained and charged with “blasphemy” against Islam during April 2007 spend their first weekend in freedom Sunday, January 25, after they were freed from prison, but the news was overshadowed by reports of violence against believers, in which at two persons died.
There was renewed concern Friday, January 23, over the situation of Christians in India as several remained detained on charges of “forcible conversion” and others recovered from injuries after Hindu militants attacked homes and prayer services, Christian rights investigators said.
Major fighting continued Tuesday, January 20, between Sri Lanka’s navy and independence seeking Tamil rebels, adding to concerns among minority Christians who fear renewed persecution by authorities, officials and rights investigators said.
Muslims in a village in western Bangladesh have reportedly forced two brothers to expel their parents from their home for converting to Christianity, Worthy News learned Monday, January 19.
Two Christian teenage girls were free Saturday, January 17, as they were rescued after being kidnapped, sold to other men as sex slaves, and forced into Islam by two radical Muslims, Christian rights investigators said.
A Christian missionary remained detained in India Tuesday, January 13, more than a week after he was detained in the state of Madhya Pradesh for allegedly forcing people to convert to Christianity, his organization said.
Villagers of the mainly Christian Karen minority in Burma on Monday, January 5, were mourning the death of a seven-year old girl who was raped and murdered by at least one government soldier, the latest in a series of sexual abuses of minorities in the country, investigators said.
Minority Christians and other non-Muslims faced potential persecution Tuesday, December 30, as militants linked to Taliban and Al-Qaeda groups imposed Shariah, or Islamic law, in the Orakzai Agency tribal region of the restive Pakistani North West Frontier Province (NWFP), officials told BosNewsLife.
A Pakistani Christian boy’s quarrel with a Muslim policeman’s son has led to his father’s imprisonment, torture, paralysis, and five-year prison sentence.
Buddhist clerics and local council officials are holding 13 newly converted Christians captive in a pagoda in a southeastern mountainous district of Bangladesh in an attempt to forcibly return them to Buddhism.
Pakistani police ransacked run-down homes of Christians living in a slum of Pakistan’s 10th largest city and “severely tortured Christian women” leaving several of them “critically injured”, local residents told BosNewsLife.
A tense calm returned to a village in Indonesia’s Central Maluku province, where angry Muslims torched churches, dozens of homes and other properties after a Christian teacher allegedly made comments insulting Islam, rights investigators said Wednesday, December 17.
Local government officials in Dak Lak Province this morning made good on their threat to destroy a new wooden church building erected in September by Hmong Christians in Cu Hat village.
A nation-wide alliance of Christian leaders, churches, mission agencies, and other Christian institutions in India has condemned widespread anti-Christian violence in the Indian state of Karnataka, which injured dozens, but “welcomed” the sentencing of those involved in church bombings.
Fearing violence, many Christians in India’s volatile state of Orissa will for the first time in their history not celebrate Christmas but instead mourn victims of recent anti-Christian attacks, which killed dozens, and those who died in shootings in Mumbai, a priest told BosNewsLife, Saturday, December 13.
A Christian politician in Pakistan’s Punjab province was recovering of his injuries Thursday, December 11, after he was apparently nearly killed by Muslim activists, amid growing religious tensions in the region.
The harassment that Bangladeshi converts from Islam face from Muslim neighbors in this southeastern area near Cox’s Bazar can take serious turns — as it did last month, when an attack by about a dozen Muslims left a Christian family with machete wounds.
Christians on the predominantly Muslim islands of Pemba and the Comoros archipelago are beaten, detained and banished for their faith, according to church leaders who travel regularly to the Indian Ocean isles off the east coast of Africa.
Christians in Orissa state are anticipating Christmas with fear as Hindu extremists have called for a state-wide bandh, or forced shut-down on all sectors of society, on Dec. 25 – a move that could provide Hindu extremists the pretext for attacking anyone publicly celebrating the birth of Christ.
In violation of Vietnam’s new religion policy, authorities in Lao Cai Province in Vietnam’s far north are pressuring new Christians among the Hmong minority to recant their faith and to re-establish ancestral altars, according to area church leaders.