Eight days after his arrest, prominent Vietnamese house church leader Rev. Tran Mai walked back into his house in Ho Chi Minh City at 11 p.m. on September 6. However, he arrived home with orders to appear for further interrogation just nine hours later at the city headquarters of the Ministry of Public Security.
Samuel Masih, a Pakistani Christian who had been accused of blasphemy under Pakistan’s strict Law 295, died tonight around 9 p.m. local time in the Lahore hospital where he was a patient.
Amid international pressure well-known house church leader Zhao Wenquan has been released from custody, two weeks after his May 9 arrest in Hegou Town, Meng Cheng County, Anhui Province, a human rights groups said Friday May 28.
Iranian police arrested a Protestant Christian pastor in northern Iran three days ago, jailing him along with his wife and two teenage children.
In spite of monumental efforts by Vietnam to minimize and cover up their brutal repression of demonstration attempts by the Montagnard ethnic minority this past Easter, consistent information is emerging that confirms atrocities.
A Protestant pastor kidnapped last Sunday morning escaped from his Islamist abductors overnight Monday, some 40 hours after he had disappeared on his way to church services in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
Six people were arrested on May 3 in connection with a February 10 incident regarding residents of a village in Orissa state, India, shaving the heads of a local pastor and eight Christian women in an effort to publicly mark them as Hindu converts.
During the Easter weekend of April 10 and 11, and on some days afterward, Montagnards in Vietnam’s Central Highlands attempted to stage demonstrations to call attention to the harsh injustices they suffer at the hands of communist authorities and ethnic Vietnamese settlers.
After a series of handwritten threats sent to Christian leaders in the Pakistani city of Quetta last week, at least one Protestant pastor has been reported missing by his family, with the whereabouts of another six uncertain.
Gu Xianggao was beaten to death on April 27 while in the custody of Chinese Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers. He was 28 years old.
Christians in Sri Lanka continue to face violent attacks and intimidation following the parliamentary elections in early April. Over 45 churches have been attacked since January, and during the past year more than 140 churches have been forced to close, due to attacks, intimidation and threats.
In what the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper called a “jet acquittal,” a criminal court in southeastern Turkey dropped all charges yesterday against a Protestant pastor accused of opening an “illegal” church.
On Tuesday, May 11, thousands of Muslims in the northern city of Kano took to the streets in protest against recent attacks on fellow Muslims in the town of Yelwa in nearby Plateau state.
A police officer in El Minia, Egypt, drove a truck into a canal killing three of his five bound prisoners, including an elderly church leader, according to a report from the U.K-based Barnabas Fund.
Fresh religious violence has erupted in Yelwa town in the central state of Plateau, Nigeria, two months after Muslim militants killed a pastor and 48 members of his church there on February 23. The latest Muslim-Christian clash has resulted in the deaths of 350 people and the disappearance of 250 women and children, according to police reports.
For the first time in history, Chinese Christians gave evidence of persecution in April at a special meeting called by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) in Geneva. Several speakers testified to beatings, imprisonment, torture and damage to church buildings in recent years.
Sectarian violence has erupted again in Ambon, South Moluccas, Indonesia, dealing a blow to the tentative Muslim-Christian dialogue that brought relative peace to the area in February this year.
Three house churches in Sarpang district of southern Bhutan were visited by police on the night of April 11 following their Easter Sunday services. According to a respected Christian leader in Bhutan, the church members were warned to discontinue meeting together for worship. The raids seem to confirm a growing crackdown against Christian activity in Bhutan.
Quechua-speaking villagers in Bolivia are living under an uneasy truce two months after an irate mob destroyed the sole evangelical church in their remote Andean community.
Chinese Pastor Gong Shengliang of the South China Church has begged to be transferred from his current prison, telling his sisters “If you are able in any way, please transfer me to another prison – otherwise just come and pick up my corpse.”