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.
Thirteen months after Egypt jailed and tortured a Coptic Christian pharmacist for marrying a former Muslim woman, Boulos Farid Rezek-Allah Awad has finally been allowed to emigrate from Egypt to Canada.
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.
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.
Pakistani police in the central province of Punjab reluctantly detained a Muslim cleric last week after a Christian university student savagely beaten and tortured inside a local Islamic madrasseh (seminary) died of his injuries.
As the campaign for elections to India’s parliament reached its heights, Indian officials ordered a Christian missionary to leave the country.
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.
Rev. Rinaldy Damanik, a pastor who many believe was framed on false charges of illegal weapons possession, has finally received permission to travel to Jakarta for urgent medical treatment. Damanik has been in and out of the Salvation Army hospital in Palu since mid-April, suffering from severe kidney problems. Doctors believe he needs urgent surgery, the facilities for which are only available in Jakarta.
Open Doors with Brother Andrew – a worldwide ministry to the Persecuted Church – has received information from several sources that Iraqi Christians and churches are seriously affected by the internal turmoil in Iraq.
Violence in Kaduna which has claimed 1000 Christian lives and destroyed 63 churches just this year, “must stop” says the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN),in a report from the U.K-based Barnabas Fund.
The host of a Turkish TV news show was sentenced to nearly two years in jail last week for airing false provocations against Turkish Protestants.
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.
The pastor of a small church in Pakistan was shot and killed last Friday in the village of Manawala, near Lahore, Pakistan.
Religious violence that erupted in the central Nigerian state of Plateau a few weeks ago has spilled into more towns and villages in that state and beyond, resulting in the deaths of eight pastors and 1,500 Christian believers, and the destruction of 173 churches.
A 30-year old Egyptian Muslim convert to Christianity, who made world headlines, has been re-united with her family after nearly two months “of torture while under interrogation,” a human rights watchdog said Monday Dec. 8.
After nine months in jail, two suspects accused of last year’s deadly Christmas night attack against a Pakistani village church have been released on bail for the duration of their trial.
A 30-year old woman who became a symbol of suffering endured by Muslim converts to Christianity was freed after nearly two months of torture and interrogation, a human rights groups announced Thursday, Dec. 4.