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.
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.
Gu Xianggao was beaten to death on April 27 while in the custody of Chinese Public Security Bureau (PSB) officers. He was 28 years old.
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.
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.
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.
Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, a blind Christian human rights lawyer, was given a four year sentence yesterday for his stand for human rights in Cuba.
Three house churches in Sarpang district of southern Bhutan were visited by police on the night of April 11 following their Easter Sunday services. According to a respected Christian leader in Bhutan, the church members were warned to discontinue meeting together for worship. The raids seem to confirm a growing crackdown against Christian activity in Bhutan.
Quechua-speaking villagers in Bolivia are living under an uneasy truce two months after an irate mob destroyed the sole evangelical church in their remote Andean community.
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.
A 100-year-old building that housed an unregistered Chinese house church was badly damaged on March 11, then completely destroyed March 31. The church was located in Dong Gang Xi village, Beilun District, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province. This congregation included about 300 members, and had existed for the past 20 years. Liu Fuen, 50, pastored the church throughout its history.
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.
Fighting between paramilitaries and guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Chocó, Colombia, abated during Holy Week. But war-weary Christians there know they cannot count on even a few days of peace in this hostile department (state) near the border with Panama.
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.
A criminal court in southeast Turkey has for the second time pressed charges against a Turkish Protestant pastor in Diyarbakir, this time accusing him of “opening an illegal church.”
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.
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.
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.