Javier Segura, the 31-year-old pastor of a Mennonite church located in the La Victoria neighborhood of Bogotá, Colombia, died instantly Sunday night, November 28, when a bomb detonated outside a public building near downtown Bogotá. The minister was the only fatality in the 10 p.m. terrorist attack in which six other people suffered injuries.
Religious minorities and the Kosovo office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are seriously concerned by a draft religion law being discussed by Kosovo’s government.
New evidence has come to light, in secretly recorded tapes obtained by Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, of oppression of native Mennonite leaders in Vietnam.
In an arbitrary verdict handed down last week by a Saudi Arabian court, Christian prisoner Brian O’Connor was convicted of the alleged possession and sale of alcohol in the strictly Muslim kingdom.
Concern is growing among Iran’s evangelical community for the safety of a pastor arrested four weeks ago by the Iranian security police.
Pastor Bradley Antolovich, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Jerusalem and father of five, watched helplessly as the horror at Beslan School #1 unfolded on television and various internet clips. The thought that these children could be his own welled up in him an unquenchable drive to reach out by going there.
Local authorities recently ordered 12 churches in the sub-district of Rancaekek, Bandung, Indonesia, to close their doors. The order came after Muslim clerics protested that the churches were meeting illegally.
Protestant ministers in the United States generally believe that religious persecution is a major problem in today’s world, and they believe the U.S. should impose sanctions against countries where this is occurring. These findings have just been released from a research study conducted among Protestant clergy in America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A 23 year-old Pakistani Christian has died of injuries as a result of five days of severe torture by Islamic militants for refusing to convert to Islam.
As the campaign for elections to India’s parliament reached its heights, Indian officials ordered a Christian missionary to leave the country.