An evangelical pastor in Turkey faced a possible jail term Wednesday, June 18, just days after a prosecutor began investigating him on charges that included to blasphemy against Islam, Christian rights investigators said.
A Turkish teenager who vowed to kill the pastor of a Protestant church and "massacre" Christians in the Black Sea coastal city of Samsun has been released by a local court because he is "to young" Turkish media reported Tuesday, January 8.
Turkish police authorities over the weekend arrested a young suspect allegedly plotting to assassinate a Christian pastor in Antalya during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Malatya’s Third Criminal Court has set November 23 to open the trial of the confessed murderers of Turkish convert Christians Necati Aydin and Ugur Yuksel and a German Christian, Tilmann Geske.
Turkish police reportedly released an American Christian from prison late Friday, April 27, after he and three other evangelists were detained in Istanbul this week for charges that included “missionary activity” and “insulting Islam.”
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There was increased concern Thursday, April 26, about the plight of active Christians in Turkey after investigators revealed that three evangelical believers were “satanically tortured” last week before being killed.
In a gruesome assault against Turkey’s tiny Christian community, five young Muslim Turks entered a Christian publishing office in the southeastern province of Malatya yesterday (April 18) and slit the throats of the three Protestant Christians present.
Persecution of Christians in North Korea “is worse than ever”, amid fresh reports of torture and executions, Christian investigators said Friday, February 2.
Assailants on Turkey’s Black Sea coast vandalized a Protestant church this weekend, days after nationalists from the region murdered a well-known Armenian journalist.
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.
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.
Bektas Erdogan never expected his Christian faith of 11 years to jeopardize his career as a fashion designer in Turkey.
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.
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.
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.”
Nearly a month after three suspects were jailed for severely injuring a Turkish Christian distributing so-called “missionary propaganda,” a court in northwest Turkey has ordered one of the alleged attackers released.
A Turkish convert to Christianity who was severely beaten for distributing New Testaments last week in his hometown of Orhangazi in northwestern Turkey has slipped into a coma in critical condition.
Seven months after the newly constructed Diyarbakir Evangelical Church opened in southeast Turkey, a local council under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism has again protested against the building’s use as a place of worship.
Two major hurdles face evangelical churches in Turkey: lack of trained leadership and suitable buildings. A Turkish church planter says conditions are now right to do something about both.
“What’s needed is …something analogous to the ancient acropolis, where today’s diversity of national and ethnic customs and religious traditions can be celebrated and upheld for the enrichment of everybody….The new acropolises will… provide opportunity for sacred expression needed to bind the people of the planet into a viable, meaningful, and sustainable solidarity.”[2] [Dean James Morton, Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, 1996 UN Conference on Human Settlements]