Christian Persecution – Asia

A group of 30 Hindu radicals from the Rastriya Swayem Sevaks (RSS) organization, attacked 18 Bible school students, who were on an evening walk at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, August 21.

Hindu militants have threatened to burn to death an Indian evangelical pastor and his family if they don’t close their Pentecostal church and leave a suburb of Bangalore, India’s third largest city, Christian supporters said Monday, August 20.

Tensions remained high Sunday, August 19, in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu after a reported crackdown by militants on Dalit Christians in which a pastors’ brother and a local official were killed.

Christians and Hindus in northern Pakistan have received dozens of letters threatening them with death if they refuse to become Muslims, church sources and a police official said yesterday.

The militant Taliban movement on Monday, August 13, released two of the 21 remaining South Korean Christians held hostage in Afghanistan, BosNewsLife monitored.

Security forces and others have killed at least 13 Christians in Laos in recent weeks as part of a crackdown on Hmong villagers “falsely accused of stirring rebel dissent”, a Christian news agency reported Tuesday, August 7.

Christians in the Philippines on Saturday, August 4, mourned the death of a Protestant pastor who was killed in one of two explosions that ripped through a bus terminal in southern Koronadal City. The blast Friday, August 3, also wounded up to 10 passengers, police and media reports said.

Pakistani officials have halted all Bible classes for Christian prisoners in a Punjab jail, isolating the inmate who taught the classes and barring a local pastor from his weekly visits, a non-governmental organization (NGO) working in prisons reported.

A Christian advocacy group has asked the chief minister of the northeastern state of Assam to provide protection to believers after unidentified assailants suspected to be Hindu extremists beat a Christian worker to death in Guwahati.

Tensions remained high Monday, July 30, among Christians in the Indian state of Kerala amid reports that the body of a 14-year-old Christian boy was found on the railway track near a Christian school while another Christian was allegedly killed by Hindu militants, missionaries said.

South Korean aid workers held hostage by Taliban forces in Afghanistan for more than a week are believed to be in poor health, according to a member of their Korean congregation.

Afghan Police on Wednesday, July 25, found the bullet riddled body of one of 23 South Korean Christians held hostage by the Taliban, shortly after the militant movement said it would begin killing them.

The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Gujarat state has resumed the secret survey of Christian institutions it began eight years ago. Extremists have used such surveys to target religious minorities for violence.

The militant Taliban movement threatened on Sunday, July 22, to start killing 23 South Korean evangelical Christians if South Korea did not agree to withdraw its 200 military engineers and medics from Afghanistan, and the Afghan government did not free Taliban prisoners.

Hundreds of people were detained as Vietnamese special police forces broke up a massive peasant demonstration for land rights in Ho Chi Min City late Wednesday, July 18, while in the Central Highlands a security crackdown on Degar Montagnard Christians continued, several leading dissidents and investigators told BosNewsLife.

Vietnam sentenced 13 Degar Montagnards, a major ethnic group in the country’s volatile Central Highlands, to prison terms of up to 15 years for “being House Church Christians” and their involvement in religious rights campaigns, representatives said Sunday, July 15.

Family and friends of Pastor Goda Israel, whose body was found in a pond in Andhra Pradesh in February, say they are still convinced that he was murdered, despite police claims of “accidental drowning.”