Egyptian Christian Bolis Rezek-Allah was pulled off an international flight this afternoon in Cairo, Egypt, and is being held by Egyptian secret police. Rezek-Allah, who had been granted an immigrant visa to Canada, was on the plane to leave Egypt when police arrested him.
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.
After 20 weeks in a Saudi jail for participating in prohibited Christian activities, Eritrean Christian Girmaye Ambaye was deported from Jeddah by plane back to his home country on Saturday, August 9.
Following lengthy judicial delays, the United Arab Emirates allowed Rev. Fernando P. Alconga to be deported back to Manila on July 23, more than nine months after he was arrested in Dubai for illegal Christian activities.
Two and one-half weeks after an Ethiopian Christian was deported from Saudi Arabia for alleged “Christian activities,” a fellow Christian prisoner of Eritrean citizenship remains jailed in Jeddah.
Asmara Police Jail, Punish 56 Prisoners Special to Compass Direct LOS ANGELES, May 8 (Compass) — Eritrean security police arrested two full-time evangelists and another 54 members of the Rema Church last night in Asmara, hauling them off to a local police station for holding illegal prayer meetings in two homes of their members. The prayer meetings were in progress in the capital’s Kahawta district when security forces raided the homes about 6 p.m., forcing the Protestant believers to stop their worship. The jailed Christians, 21 women and 35 men, remained under detention today at the No. 7 Police Station … Read more
An Arab convert to Christianity was killed in a bomb blast last night outside his Tripoli apartment, adjacent to the home of a European missionary family thought to have been targeted in the attack.
A zealous Christian preacher in the northern Nigeria city of Kano and six members of his family died in a house fire on April 22. Christian leaders in the city believe Muslim militants deliberately set the fatal blaze.
Violence in predominantly Christian Plateau State in Nigeria has continued unabated since the first major outbreak in Jos, in 2001 when over 2,000 people are thought to have died in orchestrated inter religious violence.
A total of 170 Protestant Christians have been jailed, beaten and threatened with death by Eritrean security forces in a harsh crackdown during February and March.
More than 100 persons died when a Muslim mob attacked a Christian community in western Nigeria’s Adamawa state apparently in retaliation for the deaths of 16 Muslims three months ago.
Kurdish Christian Ziwar Mohammed Ismaeel was shot dead in front of his taxi stand last month in Zakho, the northern-most city in the Kurdish safe-haven of Northern Iraq.
ISTANBUL, January 30 (Compass) — A Sudanese convert to Christianity was refused permission to board a flight to Uganda this morning at the Khartoum airport, where state security police said their computers identified him as a criminal.
Turkmenistan’s most prominent religious prisoner, the Baptist Shageldy Atakov, has been freed before the end of his four-year sentence, Keston News Service has learnt. The US-based Russian Evangelistic Ministries and the German-based Friedensstimme Mission, which maintain close ties with Baptists in the former Soviet republics, have both confirmed that Atakov was released from prison in the Caspian port city of Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk) early on 8 January and has now been reunited with his wife Artygul and five children in the town of Kaakhka close to Turkmenistan’s southern border with Iran. “Jesus has given me a Christmas gift,” Atakov was quoted as saying (many Christians in the region celebrate Christmas on 7 January).
The hearing in the case to liquidate the Love Baptist Church in the Azerbaijani capital Baku was postponed yesterday (23 January), the church’s pastor Sary Mirzoyev told Keston News Service from Baku. The Narimanov district court had been due to hear the suit, brought by Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, in the afternoon of 23 January (see KNS 18 January 2002) but the court agreed to the defendant’s request to postpone the hearing because of ill health. Yahya Mamedov, the church’s deacon and administrator, suffers from diabetes. No date has yet been set for a new hearing, but it is likely to be in about ten days’ time.
Amid growing pressure on Protestant congregations, two leaders of the unregistered Pentecostal church Living Stones have been arrested and given fifteen-day prison terms, Protestant sources in the Azerbaijani capital Baku have told Keston News Service. The two – Yusuf Farkhadov and Kasym Kasymov – were detained in Sumgait, a town close to Baku, when police and National Security Ministry officers raided a prayer meeting last Friday (18 January) held in a private flat in the town’s 9th micro-district. The two were given the two-week prison term under Article 310 of the Administrative Code, which punishes “petty hooliganism”. “All they were doing was praying,” one church member told Keston. They are serving their term in police detention cells in Sumgait.
Evangelical church leaders Kiros Meles and Abebayeh Desalegn walked free today after being jailed without charges for 10 months in the northern Ethiopian town of Maychew.
Evangelical Christians in northern Ethiopia confirmed yesterday that instead of being released as expected, two local church elders jailed without charges for 10 months were remanded back to prison two days ago by a local court judge.