Muslim fanatics burned down 10 Christian churches in the town of Makarfi in the northern state of Kaduna, Nigeria, on Saturday. Claims that a mentally retarded Christian teenager desecrated the Quran, the Muslim holy book, apparently incited the attack.
Persecuted Chinese House Church leaders, including tortured and sexually abused women, have for the first time testified at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights amid claims that the Beijing government is increasing pressure on unregistered churches and active believers, ASSIST News Service (ANS) learned Monday April 5.
Human rights watchdog The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) urged Christians Saturday, March 13, to pray for three representatives of China?s rapidly growing house church movement who it said were due to appear in a Chinese court on charges of “providing intelligence to overseas organizations.”
In January 2004, top cadres of China’s Religious Affairs Bureau and the policy-making United Front Work Department met for the annual National Religious Working Conference.
A Coptic Christian secretly married to a woman convert from Islam was arrested for the second time last week while trying to leave Egypt for Canada.
It was back in 1999 that the Turkmenistan government declared its intention to “strangle minority faiths. All foreign Christians were expelled and the persecution of national believers, especially ethnic Turkmen, intensified intolerably.
Bishop Ding, the most influential leader of the state-controlled Chinese “Three Self” Protestant church, has significantly stepped up his anti-Christian “theological construction” campaign in recent months.
17 of 22 Christian converts who were arrested in Alexandria late October, have been granted bail but one of them died and others still in prison suffer “degradation and abuse,” a human rights group said Thursday, Nov. 13.
Chinese Christian Zhang Yi-nan was badly beaten by fellow inmates last Monday at the Ping Ding Shan City Lao Dong Jiao Yang Suo. It was Zhang’s first day as an inmate at the “re-education through labor” facility where he is serving a two-year sentence.
A Turkish convert to Christianity who was severely beaten for distributing New Testaments last week in his hometown of Orhangazi in northwestern Turkey has slipped into a coma in critical condition.
U.S. Copts Association received several phone calls from the families and friends of over 20 Egyptian Muslim converts to Christianity who have been detained by the Egyptian police since October 20th.
Iraqi Christians who have become targets of attacks by Muslim extremists and bandits are risking their lives to attend church services, ASSIST News Service (ANS) has established.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN (ANS) — As the United States began a second day of air and missile attacks against Afghanistan Monday October 8, round the clock prayers intensified for twenty-four Christian aid workers held in a prison of the country’s ruling Taliban regime.
ISTANBUL, September 10 (Compass) — Taliban authorities arrested 35 more Afghan aid workers over the weekend, bringing the total to more than 50 Afghans jailed by the strict Islamist regime since early August on suspicion of aiding covert Christian missionary work.
JANUARY
Taliban leader Mohammed Omar declares on Radio Shariat that any Afghan caught professing Christianity or Judaism would be executed, and that any non-Muslim found “trying to win converts” would also be killed.
Mr. Xiao Bi-guang and Mr. Zhang Yi-nan were arrested last Friday morning in Ping Ding Shan city, Henan Province, China. Sources in China reported that more than 20 Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers made the arrest. The location where the two men are being held is unknown at this time. Their families have received no official notification, in violation of Chinese law which says the family of arrested persons will be notified of their location within 24 hours after arrest.
Police in the Eritrean capital of Asmara continued the country-wide crackdown against independent Protestant congregations this month, arresting another 12 evangelicals on September 7 while they were meeting in a private house for prayer and worship.
Fifty-seven teenage Eritrean Christians jailed last week under severe punishment for having Bibles at their military training camp remain locked in metal shipping containers, inside sources confirmed today.
Two South Korean pastors and two laymen, imprisoned in China because of their pastoral and humanitarian work among North Korean refugees, await court decisions on their fate.
BAGHDAD, IRAQ (ANS) — Iraqi Christians who have become targets of attacks by Muslim extremists and bandits are risking their lives to attend church services, ASSIST News Service (ANS) has established.