During the past two weeks, Turkmenistan’s political police have launched another harsh crackdown against its Protestant Christian citizens.
At least four known believers in the capital of Ashgabad have been subjected to repeated beatings, electric shocks, partial suffocation and other forms of torture while under interrogation, prosecution and ongoing harassment.
Turkmen police have expelled the last remaining Russian Baptist missionary in the country, the Keston News Service reported. Authorities ordered the deportation of Vitali Tereshin in March, but the missionary went into hiding to continue his work. He was located in April by Turkmenistan’s political police, the National Security Committee (KNB).
A Pentecostal church in the Kosovo capital was raided by self-proclaimed Islamic militants, according to the Keston News Service. Christians in the Muslim-majority province of Serbia say they have been the targets of attacks since Serbian troops withdrew last June.
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.
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.