Armed gunmen attacked Christian worshippers as they emerged from Easter Sunday services in a village church near the southern outskirts of Lahore yesterday, killing one young Christian man and injuring seven other congregants.
Persecuted Evangelical Christians and missionary workers in Kyrgyzstan were awaiting a new dawn late Thursday, March 24, as lawmakers of this former Soviet republic appointed a new interim president, news reports suggested.
The last 30 from a group of 131 Sunday school leaders and children have been released from custody, but a further church leader has been arrested.
Two Christian prisoners, one of whom has spent ten years behind bars, have recently been declared innocent in Peru. The first, Lucio Vilca Galindo, was arrested for the second time in April 1995. He was accused of treason against the state – a crime for which he had already been tried and acquitted. His first trial in 1993 was in a Naval Court where he was accused along with a group of others of being part of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and participating in subversive acts. The co-accused, however, stated in various forms that they had never met Lucio before and he was released.
Eritrea’s controversial President Isaias Afwerki ended a three day official visit to Pakistan Sunday, February 27, pledging to respect “democratic values” amid pressure at home to release hundreds of Christians, including children.
A Hindu fundamentalist group has accused a Christian school in Sukma district, Chhattisgarh, of forcibly distributing copies of the New Testament to students with intent to convert them.
Opposition to Christian evangelism on the campuses of two Nigerian institutions of higher learning has resulted in the murder of Sunday Nache Achi, a fourth-year architectural student at Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University in the northern city of Bauchi.
Assailants simultaneously attacked two churches in the town of Palu, Central Sulawesi, during church services on Sunday night, injuring at least three people.
Villagers on a small Indonesian island who recently joined a search for their missing pastor found only a red T-shirt with three bullet holes in it, lying on the beach near his home.
A brutal attack on a Christian book publisher in Ukraine has underscored the high stakes struggle over human rights and religious liberty in the former Soviet republic preparing for a re-run of a sharply contested presidential election.
The ‘Believers’ Church’ in the village of Kammalawa in Kuliyapitiya came under attack on December 2. At about 5pm more than 100 people arrived at the church in western Sri Lanka and told the pastor to stop holding worship services.
Religious minorities and the Kosovo office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are seriously concerned by a draft religion law being discussed by Kosovo’s government.
Six people were arrested on May 3 in connection with a February 10 incident regarding residents of a village in Orissa state, India, shaving the heads of a local pastor and eight Christian women in an effort to publicly mark them as Hindu converts.
Christians in Sri Lanka continue to face violent attacks and intimidation following the parliamentary elections in early April. Over 45 churches have been attacked since January, and during the past year more than 140 churches have been forced to close, due to attacks, intimidation and threats.
On Tuesday, May 11, thousands of Muslims in the northern city of Kano took to the streets in protest against recent attacks on fellow Muslims in the town of Yelwa in nearby Plateau state.
A 23 year-old Pakistani Christian has died of injuries as a result of five days of severe torture by Islamic militants for refusing to convert to Islam.
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.
Chinese Pastor Gong Shengliang of the South China Church has begged to be transferred from his current prison, telling his sisters “If you are able in any way, please transfer me to another prison – otherwise just come and pick up my corpse.”
Violence in Kaduna which has claimed 1000 Christian lives and destroyed 63 churches just this year, “must stop” says the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN),in a report from the U.K-based Barnabas Fund.
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.