Compass Direct News

Members of a church in Suleja, Niger state, on the northern outskirts of this Nigerian capital city, culminated a week of fasting and prayer on Sunday with a memorial service for three Christians killed in a bombing by an Islamist sect. 

 Muslim militants from the Boko Haram threw a bomb into the building of the All Christian Fellowship Mission church on July 10 as members were leaving a Sunday worship service, authorities said.

Church member Christopher Ogbu told Compass he lost his wife, Ifeanyiwa Justina Ogbu, in the explosion.

Victims of post-election violence at a hospital in Kaduna, Nigeria on April 20. Muslim rioters burned homes, churches and police stations after Nigeria's Christian president beat out his closest Muslim opponent. (AP Images/Sunday Alamba)

Christians in northern Nigeria’s Borno state, already forced to abandon worship services due to attacks by Islamic sect Boko Haram, are bracing for a massive assault to commemorate the death of the extremists group’s leader at the end of the month.

Christians are streaming out of Maiduguri, about 540 miles northeast of the Nigerian capital of Abuja, where some of the worst-hit churches are located. Churches are shutting down as many of their members have lost their lives in attacks that have not ceased even after security agencies were enlisted to confront the assailants.

Compass witnessed most church buildings were shuttered and guarded by soldiers and police in the Maiduguri areas of Wulari-Jerusalem, Railway Station, Bulunkutu, Damboa Road, and Bayan NNPC. Some churches bold enough to open were compelled to reschedule their worship services in order to outmaneuver militants who knew that most services start at 10 a.m.

Police in Bangladesh have charged two Christians and their four Muslim friends with “hurting religious sensibility” just three days after they were cleared of any wrongdoing.

The accused will appear in court tomorrow to face the charges, which were filed against them three days after they were exonerated on April 10. They had been arrested on March 24 in Damurhuda, Chuadanga district, some 210 kilometers (126 miles) northwest of Dhaka, under Section 54 of the penal code, which provides a special power to police to arrest anyone on any suspicion. They were released on bail three days later.

Mannan Mridha, a pastor in the Way of Peace movement of 490 house churches in northwest Bangladesh, told Compass that the second case was filed only to stop Christian activities in the area.

A Lao pastor imprisoned six months ago for holding a “secret meeting” has lost weight under harsh prison conditions and is extremely weak, according to his family.

Police arrested Wanna and fellow pastor and inmate Yohan, both identified only by a single name, on Jan. 4, along with several other Christians in central Laos’s Khammouan Province.

Prison authorities have repeatedly told the men that they will “walk free” as soon as they sign documents renouncing their faith, advocacy group Human Rights Watch for Lao Religious Freedom said.

An evangelical pastor, once jailed by the regime of Fidel Castro, arrived in the United States from Cuba yesterday with his family under a special resettlement program for political refugees.

The Rev. Carlos Lamelas, 50, his wife, Uramis, and two daughters, Estephanie, 18, and Daniela, 10, landed at Miami International Airport on Thursday on a direct flight from Havana.

Lamelas, who once served as national president of his denomination in Cuba, was granted asylum in the United States due to persecution he has endured for more than five years at the hands of Cuban authorities. On Feb. 20, 2006, security officials conducted an early morning raid of his home and arrested Lamelas.

Hindu extremists in Pratapgarh, Rajasthan have threatened to kill a pastor after beating his family and violating an agreement to stop attacking them, the pastor said.

Pastor Shantilal Ninama of Believers Church told Compass that the Hindu extremists beat his 65-year-old father until he fell unconscious in one of the attacks last month.

On the evening of June 8, after agreeing to do no further harm to Pastor Ninama and his family in exchange for him dropping police charges he’d filed over a previous attack, the enraged Hindu extremists stormed into his home and began beating and stoning his father, sister, wife and three children, he said. As he sought police help, his father fell unconscious and his wife and two of his children ran out into the darkness. Another daughter hid beneath a bed, and his sister escaped and hid in a valley.

A hard-line Jewish ultra-Orthodox group in Israel is taking aim at a couple it claims is manipulating minors into becoming Christians. The group, Yad L'Achim, singles out Jewish Christians, known as Messianic Jews, for harassment and abuse.

Yad L’Achim this week placed leaflets around the home of Serge and Naama Kogen, 37 and 42 respectively, in Mevasseret Zion, a suburban community located just west of Jerusalem.

Someone took out a full-page ad in a local newspaper the same week, giving the couple’s address and telling residents they were part of a missionary group “targeting” the community. The Kogens are native Israelis and hence not part of any missionary group.

Leaders of the troubled Shouwang house church in Beijing have established a legal committee to assist church members facing arrest or house arrest, the loss of employment or homes and forced relocation to their home towns.

In a press statement issued Tuesday, the unregistered church described the forced relocation of one church member to Shandong province as “a flagrant violation of the law.”

Leaders charged the committee, composed of legal experts within the church and officially formed last week, with collecting evidence of “citizens of faith being forced to leave their jobs or being evicted because of their religious belief.” The church would hold officials legally responsible for these violations, as outlined in an earlier press statement on May 12.

Chinese authorities detained a member of one of Beijing’s largest unregistered churches on Monday and sent him to his hometown in Shandong Province, sources said.

Three officers from Beijing’s Dongsheng police station detained the Shouwang church member at about 5 p.m. while he was at a market to get a mobile phone fixed, they said. They handed him over to a Shandong office based in the capital, which sent him to his hometown that evening. He was the second member of the church to be expelled from the city since authorities allegedly compelled the owners of the church’s rented facility to stop leasing to the congregation in April, forcing them to meet outdoors the past three months.

The same Dongsheng police station in Beijing’s northwest Haidian district sent the first Shouwang member to be expelled from Beijing to his hometown in Hubei Province on May 8, sources said.

Firefighters put out a fire at a church surrounded by angry Muslims in the Imbaba neighborhood in Cairo on May 7. (AP Photo)

Enraged Muslims burned down several Christian-owned homes, surrounded a church and threatened to kill a priest last week in two unrelated incidents in Upper Egypt.

On Saturday in Awlad Khalaf village, just outside Sohag, 240 miles (386 kilometers) south of Cairo, local Muslims attacked Coptic Christian Wahib Halim Atteyah, robbed him of 32,000 Saudi Riyals ($8,530), and bulldozed his home along with the other structures on his property, according to local media. The group then raided six other Coptic-owned homes and burned them to the ground. Most of the stolen items were returned because of efforts of other Muslims in the area, according to Egyptian newspaper Watani.

Increased public statements against Christianity in Iran have intensified pressures on Christians, sources said, but at their core they reflect Islamic leaders’ dismay with the growth of house churches and may signal dissension within Iran’s leadership.

“The reality is most of the house churches are so hidden that the government can’t do anything, and they know it,” said a regional expert who requested anonymity. “They just see how the house churches are still growing.”

The source said that since mass arrests at the beginning of this year, Christians have been more cautious.

AP Photo/Manish Swarup

A Catholic and two Hindu visitors with leprosy in Karnataka state were freed on bail on June 14, two days after they were beaten by suspected Hindu extremists and arrested on charges of forcible conversion.

Police arrested the Catholic, retired Indian Army Cpl. Henry Baptist Robey, and two guests from Tamil Nadu state, Ram Moorthy and another identified only as Mani, from Robey’s house on Hennur-Bellary Road in the state capital of Bangalore while they and others were celebrating Pentecost on June 12.

“I was arrested under Section 295(A) of the Indian Penal Code after a few men lodged a complaint that I was converting leprosy patients,” Robey told Compass by phone.

Military intelligence agents killed one Christian, and Islamic militants sympathetic to the government slaughtered another last week after attacking churches in Sudan’s embattled South Kordofan state.

Christian sources said a Sudan Armed Forces Intelligence unit detained Nimeri Philip Kalo, a student at St. Paul Major Seminary, on June 8 near the gate of the United Nations Mission in Sudan in Kadugli’s al Shaeer area and shot him in front of bystanders. Kalo and other Christians were fleeing the town after Muslim militias loyal to the SAF attacked and looted at least three church buildings in Kadugli, they said.

UNMIS’s mandate is to support the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the government of Sudan and the country’s Christian and animist south, scheduled to secede on July 9, by helping in the disarmament process, among other means. Armed conflict between southern and northern militaries broke out in Kadugli on June 6 after northern forces seized Abyei last month.

Police last weekend detained a further 16 members of Beijing’s Shouwang house church and placed several more under house arrest, while members of China’s government-approved churches have gone to police stations to “admonish” detained house church members, according to a statement issued yesterday by church leaders.

Of those detained, police held two in protective custody in hotels, beginning on the evening of June 10, while another 14 who turned up at Shouwang’s designated outdoor worship site on Sunday morning were taken away and sent to 10 different police stations. Of those detained Sunday, 13 were released by midnight while the last was released the next day.

At least 10 Christian families in a village in Pakistan’s Punjab Province have fled their homes after a throng of area Muslims accused a Christian of blaspheming Islam on Friday.

Yousaf Masih of village No. 68 AR Farmwala, in Khanewal district’s Mian Channu area, told Compass that his brother Yaqub’s grandson, 8-year-old Ihtesham (also known as Sunny), had gone out to fetch ice when Muslim boys from a nearby religious school started harassing him.