ISTANBUL, October 24 (Compass) — Forty-eight hours after Karachi police abducted Robin Peranditta from the grounds of the Sindh High Court, the traumatized survivor of last month’s deadly Christian massacre is now confirmed to be released from police custody.
NASHVILLE, TN (ANS) — The sheer volume of hard evidence presented at the press conference was staggering.
Names, addresses and photographs of 23,686 Chinese Christians recently arrested for their faith. Twenty thousand beaten. One hundred twenty-nine killed. More than 4,000 sentenced to labor and “re-education†camps. Homes and property confiscated or destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of children homeless orphans.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA — An uncertain number of leaders of a major house church movement in China have disappeared in what at first was thought to be a massive government raid. Now cult activity is suspected.
In late April, reports filtered out from China that about 100 leaders of the evangelical China Gospel Fellowship — a major house church grouping that claims some four million members — had been arrested by the police. Soon after, contradictory but more reliable reports said these key leaders had almost certainly been kidnapped by the sinister Lightning from the East (LFE) cult in a carefully orchestrated strategy.
Leaders of the South China Church have had their sentences reduced by the same court that tried them the first time after a retrial was ordered by the Hubei Province Supreme Court.
Leaders from a mainstream house church in China have been released after being abducted.
The 34 senior leaders from the China Gospel Fellowship were abducted on April 16 by a group called Eastern Lightning (EL), which uses violence against church members.
WUHAN, China (BP)–Attorneys for a Chinese Christian leader who barely escaped execution in January want his retrial to be conducted in public this time, according to sources close to the case.
BEIJING, CHINA – All of the 33 leaders from the China Gospel Fellowship who were kidnapped in April by the Eastern Lightning cult have been released, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) of the UK. News of how this occurred is not yet available.
JIDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA (ANS) — A further six Christian men have been arrested in the coastal city of Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, as the crackdown on believers in the city escalates, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide.
LOS ANGELES, January 3 (Compass) — Saudi Arabian authorities transferred the last five of 14 foreign Christians from their Jeddah prison cell to a deportation center yesterday, according to nine other Christian prisoners already moved there on December 22 and 23.
WASHINGTON, DC (ANS) – – Two Filipino Christians were quietly whisked away from their homes near Jeddah early Wednesday morning, April 10, according to the Washington, DC based human rights organization, International Christian Concern (ICC).
Six members of a Baptist congregation in the town of Khazar (formerly Cheleken) were fined in mid-January for holding “illegal services”, Keston News Service has learned. The instruction to fine them came from the political police, the KNB (former KGB), the six were told. The Turkmen authorities routinely fine members of unregistered religious congregations for holding religious meetings, even if such meetings take place in private homes.
Just two days after a court in the capital Baku liquidated a Baptist congregation, a local policeman in the small town of Chukhuryurd near Shemakha in central Azerbaijan tried to ban a small Baptist church from meeting, Baptist sources told Keston News Service. “He had heard the news of the Baku church’s liquidation on ANS television and came to the local elder last Friday [5 April] and told him the church could not meet on Sunday for worship,” Ilya Zenchenko, head of the Baptist Union in Azerbaijan, told Keston from Baku on 10 April. “We told the church elder on Saturday the policeman had been overzealous and exceeded his powers and that his demands for the church not to meet had no legal basis.”
by Felix Corley, Keston News Service As believers who claim their rights have been violated by the state authorities debate and argue over the best way to resolve such violations, Keston News Service has discovered that Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, has repeatedly warned believers not to take their complaints to foreigners. “Come to us with your problems and we will sort them out,” he has told religious minority leaders, despite the fact that his office is often the cause of the violations or – in cases where other agencies have violated believers’ … Read more
by Felix Corley, Keston News Service As believers who claim their rights have been violated by the state authorities debate and argue over the best way to resolve such violations, Keston News Service has discovered that Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, has repeatedly warned believers not to take their complaints to foreigners. “Come to us with your problems and we will sort them out,” he has told religious minority leaders, despite the fact that his office is often the cause of the violations or – in cases where other agencies have violated believers’ … Read more
On the day Baku’s Protestant Greater Grace church was celebrating Easter, police in the city’s central Sabail district tried to forcibly deport a church member, alleging that she had been conducting religious “propaganda”. One of the church’s pastors, Musfig Bayram, told Keston News Service from Baku that police took Nina Koptseva, a Russian citizen who has a residence permit to live in Baku, to the city’s railway station on Sunday morning (31 March), bought her a ticket to the Russian border and tried to place her on the train without any court decision. It was only when she screamed loudly and insisted that if she had to leave she could buy an airline ticket to Russia herself that police halted the attempt and returned her to the cells in the Sabail district police station. Koptseva is now slated for deportation today (1 April) by air.
MINSK, BELARUS (ANS) — In a move expected to further isolate isolate the former Soviet Republic underground , Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko signed Europe’s “most restrictive religious law,” Thursday October 31, the Keston News Service (KNS) said.
Three Baptists have been fined for taking part in a street outreach in the town of Lepel in the north-eastern region of Vitebsk and a further six were given official warnings, Keston News Service has learnt in a statement from local Baptists. At their 6 June trial, two other Baptists were acquitted. Reached by telephone in Lepel on 11 June, the judge in the case, Nikolai Kozlovsky, refused to explain why the Baptists had been put on trial. “We don’t give out information by telephone,” he told Keston, before putting down the telephone. The town’s police chief, Konstantin Borovik, reached by telephone the same day, also refused to explain. “The Baptists violated the law,” was all he would tell Keston.
The campaign group For Freedom of Conscience has described as “a bolt from out of the blue” the sudden adoption by parliament yesterday (27 June) of a repressive religion bill that only a day earlier had been postponed until the autumn (see KNS 26 June 2002). “Yesterday, when I learnt that consideration of the draft law had been postponed until the autumn I thought that common sense had prevailed among the deputies,” German Rodov, head of the Bible Society, declared in a 27 June statement passed to Keston News Service. “But today I have the impression that in taking these decisions the deputies are completely ignoring the views of tens of thousands of Belarusian citizens. This law is a fiasco for the Chamber of Representatives as a parliament and testimony to its bankruptcy.” Religious minorities in Belarus now fear President Aleksandr Lukashenko will sign the bill into law today, the last day of the parliamentary session.
Jerusalem (ICEJ) — Israeli and US intelligence officers believe that al-Qaida plans to launch suicide attacks against Israel and against Israelis abroad, based on information on a Web site officials believe speaks for the terrorist organization.