A pastor and his cousin charged with attempted forced conversion in Matiapada village, Orissa state, were released on bail yesterday, while five Hindu villagers charged with assault and setting fire to the pastor’s house are still in custody.
Judges at Indonesia’s Constitutional Court on January 17 ruled that the Child Protection Act is in line with the constitution and should not be amended. The Rev. Ruyandi Hutasoit had challenged Article 86 of the Act, used as the basis for sentencing Dr. Rebekka Zakaria, Eti Pangesti and Ratna Bangun to three years in prison on September 1, 2005. The Christian Sunday School teachers were arrested in May 2005 after members of a local Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI or Muslim Clerics Council) in West Java accused them of trying to convert Muslim children. Judge Jimly Asshiddique said Rev. Hutasoit had no right to contest the Child Protection Act, since he had not experienced any ‘direct losses’ under it.
The government of India’s largest northwestern state, Rajasthan, has withdrawn criminal procedures against most militants of an influential Hindu nationalist organization involved in the massive distribution of ‘tridents’, three-sponged spears that have reportedly been used to intimidate the Christian minority, BosNewsLife learned Monday, January 23.
At this time last year, Noor Jehan Ahmed, 55, lived peacefully in the village of Nagaon, in the northeastern state of Assam. She and her extended household of 29 people formed their own Christian enclave within the majority-Muslim community.
Prosecuted Chinese house churches on Saturday, January 21, were expecting more legal support after a group of top Chinese lawyers and legal scholars announced the establishment of an association dedicated to defending Chinese Christians.
Hindu extremists attacked Christians in two incidents in the same district of Andhra Pradesh state on January 12 and 13, in one case dragging a pastor from a child’s birthday party and kicking him unconscious.
Local government officials in Bandung, West Java, have ordered eight house churches in the Rancaekek Kencana housing complex to cease meeting in private homes starting last Sunday (January 15).
Funeral preparations were underway Friday, January 20, where at least one Christian and a dozen others were injured when Muslim militants set fire to a Christian community center in Upper Egypt, church sources and news reports said.
Christians in several tense Indian states were weighing their options Tuesday, January 17, after churches were attacked and believers apparently pressured to return to Hinduism.
A so-called “documentary” televised regionally in Uzbekistan last summer has left entire communities convinced that a Protestant congregation is an “extremist” group worse than fundamentalist Islam.
Cuba’s influential blind Christian dissident, Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, was facing another tense night Monday, January 16, after government backed crowds, armed with loudspeakers, reportedly threatened to storm his house and kill everyone inside.
Burmese government forces attacked villages of the Karen and Karenni people, displacing 1,200 villagers, as part of a “slow genocide” against these predominantly Christian ethnic groups, a religious rights group said late Thursday, January 5.
In a shocking display of brutality, Aroun Voraphorn, an itinerant evangelist, pastor and father of four children, was murdered in southern Laos the week before Christmas.
At least 40 pastors, elders and leading laymen from five of Eritrea’s banned Protestant churches have been arrested from their homes or offices in the past two weeks in the capital of Asmara.
As Christmas approaches, Chinese security forces have reportedly arrested dozens of leaders of the rapidly growing house churches, BosNewsLife learned Tuesday, December 13.
For Pastor Zacheous Habu Bu Ngwenche, time is running out. In the next two weeks he may find himself back in police detention if he does not produce a convert from Islam abducted from his house by Muslim militants in September.
During Friday prayers last week in Pakistan’s Punjab province, Muslim clerics flanked by government officials demanded the public execution of a Christian accused of blasphemy.
Iranian Christians are mourning the death of Ghorban Dordi Tourani, an Iranian believer assassinated two weeks ago by an unnamed group of fanatical Muslims and the first Turkmen in Iran known to have been martyred for his Christian faith.
Two militant Hindu groups struck churches in India’s Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh states and forced some believes to bow for Hindu idols states as violence against Christians spread across the country, news reports said Tuesday, December 6.
A major report has been published this weekend documenting for the first time the extent of the government backed torture in Burma’s jails, human rights investigators said.