At least seven people were killed after suspected Islamic State terror group radicals attacked a bank and the Church of Saint George in El-Arish, Egypt. The militants were seen waving their black flags through the streets in celebration.
A Coptic Orthodox priest has been stabbed to death in Cairo, Egypt. The head of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the UK has decried what he said was the injustice surrounding the crime.
The mass trials of over 6,600 suspects believed to be members of Islamic radical group Boko Haram have begun in Nigeria, and are being carried out in secret by civilian court judges at a military facility in Kainji town.
On September 17, 2017, suspected Hindu radicals attacked an Assembly of God church in India’s Karnataka state. After the attack, church attendance has plummeted as Christians in the area fear another attack. It is not surprising that attacks are increasing in Karnataka as state elections are scheduled to occur early next year. Hindu hardline groups want to silence Christians and ensure that they are unable to practice their faith.
Provoked by the mission work of a local house church, officials detained a pastor and her daughter on Sept. 22, taking the daughter’s three-year-old son into custody as well.
The situation of a newly converted Christian couple who were summoned to the intelligence office of the Revolutionary Guards Corps in Tehran on September 11 and arrested after interrogation is still unclear.
Extreme Muslim groups, with the assistance of Egyptian police, are carrying out a systematic strategy of kidnapping Coptic Christian young women, according to a report by World Watch Monitor.
A month after seven church leaders were arrested, interrogated and released on bail, police in Sudan detained and questioned another church leader in Omdurman on Friday (Sept. 22), sources said.
International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that on September 14, a Muslim mob in the village of Tawa in Minya attacked the local Coptic Christian community. Homes, businesses, and cars were destroyed and three Copts suffered minor injuries. These attacks were in retaliation against a Facebook post which was widely shared among Christians. The author, a 22-year-old Christian resident of Tawa named Bassem, had written the post in May following the deadly attack by Islamic extremists against a caravan of Coptic Christians traveling to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor.
An organization with ties to the Chinese Communist Party has unveiled new plans on how the government can enforce its restrictions on churches, including forced registration with state-run Christian institutions.
Four Christians in Nepal sentenced to five years in prison on false charges of “witchcraft” and “violence” were released today after a high court annulled their convictions, church leaders said.
Believers with Muslim and Buddhist backgrounds are the most persecuted Christian groups in China, according to a watchdog organization. And those Christians are in urgent need of Bibles in their own languages.
China has tightened its ‘choke-hold’ on churches across the country in recent weeks, according to the rights and religious freedom group China Aid.
Concerns among Russian Christians that the government’s antiterrorism legislation, adopted last year, would take away their religious freedom have been proven true.
International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that on September 6, 2017, four Christians were killed in Hindi by al-Shabaab, Christians’ main persecution threat in Kenya.
Andrew Brunson, the American pastor who has been imprisoned in Turkey for nearly a year on dubious terrorism charges, is now facing new charges: ‘gathering state secrets for espionage, attempting to overthrow the Turkish parliament and government, and to change the constitutional order.’
A woman in eastern Uganda who put her faith in Christ is in hiding after her husband beat her for leaving Islam, sources said.
A band of Hindu extremists who had snuck into a house-church service beat a pastor with steel rods and sticks, one of them yelling that they would stop if he shouted, ‘Hail, Lord Ram [Jai Sri Ram]!’
While attacks against the Christian minority has increased in Nepal, the Himalayan country’s parliament passed a bill criminalizing religious conversion and the “hurting of religious sentiment,” aiming to restrict evangelism. The move is likely to further escalate Christian persecution.
Police in Sudan arrested and interrogated seven church leaders last week in Omdurman, Sudan before releasing them on bail, sources said.