A crowd of nearly 500 Hindu villagers attacked the pastor of a house church, his wife and other church members in the southern state of Karnataka on May 1. The attackers sexually molested female church members and burned Bibles and other Christian literature.
One week after arresting 40 Pakistani Christians, Saudi Arabia’s vigilante religious police broke up another private worship service of expatriate Christians in the capital last Friday.
Voodoo leaders in a rural area of the African nation of Benin have attacked Christian missionaries and kidnapped their two young children to kill and “sacrifice” them to a voodoo god, sources told BosNewsLife Tuesday, May 3.
A married couple who run two children’s homes in Nepal were imprisoned on April 27, charged with forced conversion, according to a ministry report from EquipNepal.
Vietnamese authorities released 22-year-old children’s Bible teacher Le Thi Hong Lien from Bien Hoa Mental Hospital yesterday morning.
Pakistani Christian who was shown kindness by his Muslim employer has been attacked and beaten by a gang of Muslims. Shahbaz Masih was attacked by a group of seven or eight Muslims from his village on April 23 and left for dead, with both legs broken, says a report from the Barnabas Fund.
The government of Vietnam is stepping up its persecution of minority Christians, according to detailed accounts received recently by Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom.
Human rights group Open Doors has warned Christians in the Netherlands they may soon be persecuted, an influential Dutch evangelical newspaper reported.
Dozens of opposition supporters were in jail Thursday, April 28, after a Belarusian court sentenced them for anti government protests, and Christians warned of more tensions in the troubled former Soviet republic.
Christian leaders in the northeastern state of Manipur held an emergency meeting on April 22 to consider their response to an attack on a church in Thoubal district on April 19.
In recent weeks, details have emerged from Laos outlining a new crackdown on tribal Christians in the southern province of Savannakhet.
40 Pakistani Christians who were detained over the weekend in Saudi Arabia for holding a joint Catholic-Protestant prayer service have been released, news reports said Monday, April 25.
Currently 16 full-time pastors are among nearly 900 Eritrean Christians known to be jailed in local prisons, military confinement camps and shipping containers for daring to meet secretly for prayer and worship outside government-sanctioned churches.
Unknown killers kidnapped and brutally killed a Protestant pastor and his driver near the capital of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) last week, apparently in retribution for their evangelizing activities among Muslims.
Two survivors of the North Korean prison camps have spoken at the UN Commission on Human Rights, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and at the EU.
Iranian Christian Hamid Pourmand must appear before the Islamic (sharia) court of Iran within nine days. An exact court date has not been released. Arrested last September when security police raided a church conference he was attending, the Assemblies of God lay pastor will be brought up before the Islamic court between April 11 and 14 to face charges of apostasy from Islam and proselytizing Muslims to the Christian belief. Both “crimes” are punishable by death.
The chief minister of India’s western state of Maharashtra, Vilasrao Deshmukh, has rejected a proposed ‘anti-conversion bill’ amid warnings the legislation would increase the persecution of Christians, BosNewsLife monitored Monday, April 4.
The family of the Rev. Jokran Ratu, kidnapped four months ago on a remote Indonesian island, still does not know whether he is dead or alive. No ransom demand has been received and police have not apprehended the kidnappers.
Lawyers acting on behalf of the Rev. Nguyen Hong Quang informed his wife last week that his appeal before the People’s Supreme Court of Vietnam has been rescheduled for April 12.
Sources have confirmed the murder by beheading on March 8 of Dulal Sarkar, a lay pastor and evangelist in Bangladesh.