The government of India’s largest northwestern state, Rajasthan, has withdrawn criminal procedures against most militants of an influential Hindu nationalist organization involved in the massive distribution of ‘tridents’, three-sponged spears that have reportedly been used to intimidate the Christian minority, BosNewsLife learned Monday, January 23.
At this time last year, Noor Jehan Ahmed, 55, lived peacefully in the village of Nagaon, in the northeastern state of Assam. She and her extended household of 29 people formed their own Christian enclave within the majority-Muslim community.
A so-called “documentary” televised regionally in Uzbekistan last summer has left entire communities convinced that a Protestant congregation is an “extremist” group worse than fundamentalist Islam.
During Friday prayers last week in Pakistan’s Punjab province, Muslim clerics flanked by government officials demanded the public execution of a Christian accused of blasphemy.
For Ishaya Kpotun Shaba of Niger state in north-central Nigeria, the past four years have been a jumble of tears and pain. He has not set his eyes on his daughter, Saratu, since she was abducted in December 2001 at age 19 by extremists bent on converting and marrying her to a Muslim.
Denied permits and ordered not to worship in public or at home, churches in East Bekasi, West Java, have taken temporary refuge in a Social Affairs Agency office.
Beijing authorities on November 4 ordered a Chinese legal firm to suspend activities for a year, hours after top lawyer Gao Zhisheng filed court documents in defense of Pastor Cai Zhuohua.
Pastor Cai was abducted from a bus stop and dragged into a van by three plain-clothed State Security officers on September 11 2004. According to a former fellow inmate, Pastor Cai was repeatedly tortured with electric shocks and forced to give false confessions to serious charges.
Hindu extremists disrupted a large prayer gathering in the house of a Christian family in Pratapgarh district, Uttar Pradesh state, on Sunday (November 6).
Shahjahan Mollah, 35, lives in the village of Butia about 120 miles north of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Shahjahan, a former Muslim, converted to Christianity in 1991. He currently pastors a church of some 27 Muslim converts to Christianity in Butia.
A U.S. Christian faces one year in prison after a trial in which he was accused of raping and beating Magda Refaat Gayed at his Cairo shelter for troubled women.
Former Muslim residents in a remote village of the ex-Soviet union republic of Uzbekistan are being beaten, publicly humiliated and forced from their homes and jobs for converting to Christianity, a news agency investigation religious persecution said Friday, October 21.
Cuban police forces closed down a Christian printing press and detained a pastor for distributing “subversive” materials amid a nationwide government crackdown on house churches and pro-democracy activists on the Communist island, dissident sources and human rights investigators said Tuesday, October 18.
Human rights investigators expressed concern Wednesday, October 19, about the situation of Christians in Nigeria, after a pastor and his wife were allegedly attacked by an angry mob for preaching and condemning idol worshipping.
A family of Iranian converts to Christianity faces jail time, the death sentence and the forced marriage of their daughter if Turkish authorities forcibly deport them back to Iran next week after nearly three years of failed attempts to obtain U.N. refugee status.
A Christian worker is in jail in Indore, in the north-central state of Madhya Pradesh, after authorities arrested him on October 7 for “converting young children from poor Hindu families to Christianity.”
Over 200 evangelical Christians and members of minority churches have been detained in Eritrea this week in unprecedented coordinated raids by the African nation’s security forces, BosNewsLife learned Thursday, October 6.
A Pentecostal church in Romania which seeks a spiritual “revival” in the post-Communist nation urged the European Parliament Thursday, October 6, to halt plans by the Romanian government to restrict activities of religious minorities.
About 150 evangelicals – 40 families – will be expelled from their homes in San Nicolas, Hidalgo state, at the end of October, according to a town council vote on Saturday, October 1.
A Christian businessman and friend of an evangelist in China’s Xinjiang province was rushed to hospital after being “tortured” by security agents amid an ongoing “comprehensive campaign” against Christians in the region, a US-based religious rights organization said Saturday, October 1.