In Depth:  Morning Star News

A 21-year-old Christian woman from Somalia called Fozia was beaten unconscious by hardline Muslims in Isiolo, Kenya, it has been reported.

Fozia’s family had already fled Muslim persecution in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi in the previous year. In the attack, Fozia’s 18-year-old brother’s hands and ribs were badly injured and her sister, Asha, aged 19, had two teeth broken.

Under pressure from an official in the ruling Hindu nationalist political party, police in Uttar Pradesh state released a suspect without charges over the attempted killing of a pastor in May.

‘When we entered the police station for the identification process, the attacker was treated like a VIP, not as a criminal,’ said Deepak Kumar, the brother-in-law of the pastor. ‘He was released the same day, even after we insisted that he is the one.’

A former sheikh who secretly became a Christian on Christmas Day decided to tell his two wives about his new faith in May which resulted in his house being set ablaze.

After revealing his Christian faith to his wives, he asked his pastor to explain the gospel and help lead his family to faith in Christ. One of his wives put her faith in Christ as Lord and Saviour, and the other declined.

Hardline Muslim residents beat a Christian convert with sticks and burned his home for refusing to renounce Christ, it was reported in June.

Mbulakyaalo Badawuyi said he came to faith in 2019 after a dream about Christ when he fell asleep during night prayers with other sheikhs and Muslims at a mosque. ‘I fell asleep and had a dream that Isa [Jesus] told me that I was in a wrong place, and that therefore I was to go and look for His shepherds who will teach me all His holy words, then after learning go and preach those words to others,’ he said.

When a convert from Islam in Iran was sentenced to two years in exile in Sarbaz in 2019, the judge warned him that religious extremists in the remote desert town would treat him harshly (en December 2019).

However, when Ebrahim Firoozi arrived in southwest Iran near the border with Pakistan, he discovered local Muslims were helpful, open and hospitable. This discovery was all the more welcome as in March his term of exile was extended by another 11 months.

On 25 February a Muslim landowner chained and tortured a young Christian man, who later died from his injuries, after accusing him of ‘polluting’ his tube-well water by rinsing in it.

Saleem Masih, 22, had finished unloading chaff in fields in Baguyana village, Karsur District, some 50 kilometres (31 miles) from Lahore, and was rinsing himself off in the tube-well when property owner Sher Dogar and other men rushed over, yanked him out of the water and began beating him.

The pastor of a church in eastern Uganda received threatening messages from Muslim villagers in February.

The messages said the church would be destroyed because Muslims were converting to Christ. His congregation is dwindling as members have stopped attending services out of fear of an Islamist attack.

Ethnic rebels who closed more than 100 churches in eastern Myanmar (Burma) in 2018 have allowed many to reopen, sources said in late December.

Ethnic Wa rebels of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) announced they had permitted 51 Baptist churches to reopen in northern Shan state after investigating the congregations and their activities for 14 months. The review process is still underway for the remaining churches, according to UWSA officials.

On 1 December, tribal animists in eastern India surrounded a church building with axes, threatened to kill the Christians inside and later burned down the thatched-roof structure.

The attack by hardline animists in Perigaon village followed raids on Christians’ homes five days earlier to seize and burn Bibles. The police had not been called as the area has no mobile phone coverage.

When Florence Namuyiga’s Muslim husband asked her why their seven-year-old son was singing Christian songs, she remained silent.

Namuyiga, a 27-year-old mother of three in central Uganda’s Lwebitati village, Kitumbi Parish in Mubende District, had been secretly attending church services with her two- and five-year-old sons since putting her faith in Christ. She had not chanced taking her eldest son until recently.

After spending 11 years behind bars for a murder they did not commit, five Christians in eastern India were finally ordered to be freed on 26 November.

The Supreme Court of India issued a decision granting bail to the five believers from Odisha (formerly Orissa) state. They had been falsely accused of killing Hindu leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, whose death in 2008 in led to anti-Christian attacks that saw 120 people killed, over 5,000 homes destroyed and 55,000 Christians displaced.

In an area of central India where tribal animists enlist Maoist militants to kill Christians who refuse to recant, Sodi Joga took it seriously when relatives threatened to kill him, his wife and 5-year-old daughter.

Joga and his family had been attending Christian worship services for more than a year. They wouldn’t take part in a cleansing ritual and bow to tribal deities. As a result, villagers expelled the family from their home. Violence against Christians from tribal villages reached a level of at least one incident every other week. Shunned by their tribal kinsmen, new Christians must be supported by strong churches.

Islamic extremist group Boko Haram released a video on 22 September showing the execution of two Christian aid workers.

Lawrence Duna Dacighir and Godfrey Ali Shikagham, both members of the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN) in Plateau state, were shown kneeling while three masked, armed men stood behind them. The two young men, who had gone to Maiduguri to help build shelters for people displaced by Islamic extremist violence, were then shot from behind.

Interrupting a worship service, police on 6 August sealed a church building in north-central Algeria, less than three months after locking shut another site in the same area.

‘I am deeply saddened by so much injustice – it breaks my heart,’ Pastor Messaoud Takilt said. ‘This is not surprising since other Christian places of worship have been closed and sealed.’

A woman was divorced by her Muslim hus-band after he discovered she owned a Bible, it was reported in August.

The husband of the 32-year-old mother of two children discovered that his wife was a Christian and owned a Bible. He demanded that she reveal who had given it to her.

In August, it was reported that a family (with eight children and an 87-year-old grandfather) was expelled from their vil-lage after locals harassed them for leaving indigenous religious practices to follow Jesus.

Miguel Pérez Díaz and his family moved to a mountainside shack to escape the persecution. Their water supply was cut, then they were forced to leave their home. Leaving the ‘traditionalist’ blend of Roman Catholic and indigenous rituals and beliefs, the Pérez family put their faith in Christ four years ago and began a small fellowship in their home.

Local authorities in western Myanmar forced three Christians to convert to Buddhism, it was reported in June.

In Ann Township in southern Rakhine state, five local officials led by U Tin Shwe Maung took two ethnic Chin Christians from their homes in Padi Kyin village to a monastery and threatened to expel them from the village if they did not convert to Buddhism.

Part of a Christian primary school in east-ern Uganda was demolished on 2 June after local Muslims who opposed it threatened ‘tough action’.

One of the aims of the school is to provide education to formerly Muslim children whose parents have disowned them for putting their faith in Christ. The building containing three of Hope of Glory Primary School’s seven classrooms was destroyed before dawn.

Suspected Fulani herdsmen stormed a church choir practice and kidnapped 17 Christians in north-central Nigeria on 18 May, the same night gunmen killed a Christian and kidnapped two others at a Baptist church, sources said.

‘As we were in the church, Fulani herds-men numbering over 20 just surrounded the church and started shooting’, Ezekiel Ishaya said. ‘Everybody was terrified, but there was no way we could run because they had already surrounded the church. They were asking for the pastor’s house, and they threatened to shoot us if we didn’t show them the house. Some of them went to the pastor’s house while others kept watch over us.’

Muslim Fulani herdsmen attacked two predominantly Christian villages in north-central Nigeria after beating, raping, and killing a 19-year-old Christian woman in the pre-dawn hours on 23 March, her father said.

Danlami Mante said armed Muslim Fulani herdsmen ambushed Joy Danlami and her two younger siblings as they were returning to their village at 2a.m. after the Christians attended a community feast. His younger daughter, 16-year-old Patience Danlami, and 14-year-old son, Aboy Danlami, escaped with gunshot and machete wounds.

The Somali pastor of an underground church in Kenya near the Somali border suffered a broken thigh bone and other injuries after Muslim extremists beat him with wooden clubs on 8 March.

Pastor Abdul, a 30-year-old father of three, had finished leading a prayer gathering on the outskirts of Garissa and was on his way back to his house when several ethnic Somali Muslims attacked.

Somali Muslims who beat and raped a Christian mother of four in January began sending threatening messages more than a year ago at a refugee camp in Kenya.

The 41-year-old Somali woman was a Muslim living in Somalia with her husband when he sent her and their four children to Kenya’s Ifo refugee camp in Dadaab, near the Somali border, in 2016. She put her faith in Christ a year later, though it remained a secret until Somali Muslims saw her coming from church worship at Dadaab International Worship Centre in 2018.

Muslim policemen on 19 January beat and arrested a Christian man on the outskirts of Nairobi in retaliation for refusing to recant Christianity.

Accompanied by two Muslims of Somali descent who had attacked him previously, the policemen arrived at the home where the man lived with his widowed mother. The officers along with the two others punched, kicked, trampled and struck him with blunt objects, relatives said.

Having fled Sudan after authorities threatened to kill him if he refused to return to Islam, a Sudanese Christian now faces death threats in Egypt, it was reported in January.

Al Hadi Izzalden Shareef Osman received death threats by social media and verbally. Osman previously worked as a journalist in Sudan. He left Khartoum in 2014 after police accused him of apostasy. They arrested and tortured him.

A Christian mother from Sudan who had been tortured for her faith, had deep cause for fear in the Autumn when her Muslim brother went to her church in Cairo, Egypt with a photo of her husband and asked members if they knew his whereabouts.

Muslim extremists from Sudan had kidnapped and tortured her less than two years earlier in Cairo, and they threatened to kill her husband and daughter if she refused to return to Islam.

Muslims in eastern Uganda put a Christian mother in hospital with injuries from a beating in one village, and tore down a church building in another in an attack on 20 December.

Both the woman and the Pastor of the destroyed church building fear their lives could be in danger.

Christians in India who previously experienced little or no opposition reported that Hindu extremists stoned, slashed and terrorised them over Christmas 2018.

At least 18 incidents against Christians were reported and verified during the Christmas season. Of those incidents, ten were reported from Uttar Pradesh state, three from Uttarakhand state, three from Tamil Nadu state and two from Maharashtra state.

Amir Taleipour, 39, and his wife Mahnaz Harati, 36, were arrested in front of their seven-year-old daughter by intelligence agents who raided their home in Mashhad in December.

The couple has not been allowed to communicate with family members or access legal assistance since. Family members are caring for their daughter while the couple is in detention.

Pastor John Lakra was taking his 18-month-old baby to the hospital for emergency treatment in Odisha state in late October, when hundreds of Hindu extremists surrounded his car.

A mob began hurling stones and hitting the windows with rods as they shouted curses at him. Earlier he had received word that Hindu extremists were looking for him regarding a text message and photo insulting the Hindu goddess Durga that a hacker had sent from his phone. He thought they only meant to talk with him.

On 14 November, a bill calling for the elimination of religious designation on ID cards, quickly died at the committee stage.

ID cards see a Christian designation causing problems for approximately ten per cent of the population at police checkpoints, hospitals and workplaces. Christianity, Islam and Judaism are the only three religion options on the ID cards.

High-caste Hindus who had been harassing a church in Nepal forced it to shut down in early November.

For two months Brahmins, the highest caste from which Hindu priests and teachers are drawn, had disrupted worship of the Pakhluwa Eternal Life Church, in western Nepal’s Palpa District, each week and accused Pastor Tufani Bhar of converting villagers, the pastor said.

After a family in south-east Kenya put their faith in Christ in November, Muslims gave them one day to return to Islam or be killed, the father said.

‘We were given a day to either recant the Christian faith or face the sword, as well as lose all the privileges the Muslims had given to us,’ said Abdul Abuk-Bakr of Sera village, Garsen.

Villagers hostile toward Christians in northern India falsely accused a pastor of an illicit relationship with a woman and, in another village, burned a church building, it was reported on 7 November.

Neighbours alerted Pastor Satpal Masih that his Pentecostal church building in Giddi village, Gurdaspur District in Punjab state, was ablaze. The pastor dismissed the notion that the church building caught fire from a Diwali festival accident as the incident was too early in the evening. The church is built on a farm and so it was unlikely that people would use fireworks near the building. Police concurred with this.

After torturing and threatening to charge them with serious crimes, authorities released 13 Christians arrested in the Darfur Region in October.

Personnel from Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) released 12 of the Christians in one group and freed church leader Tajaldin Idriss Yousif a few days later, all without charges. They threatened to charge the native Darfur evangelist and others with apostasy, public disturbance and crimes against the state. All were said to be in poor shape, but one was in a critical condition owing to torture.

Pastor Umar Mulinde, a highly effective evangelist in Uganda who survived a horrific acid attack in 2011, said in September that he escaped another attempted assault by Islamic extremists.

Following a one-week evangelistic event in Mubende, Pastor Mulinde was driving the 90 miles back to the Ugandan capital of Kampala on 25 September when a band of men blocked a road. He managed to maneouvre around them.

In a surprise move, Sudan has released shipments of Bibles long held in port, including one detained nearly six years ago, according to the head of the Bible Society in Sudan.

The Revd Ismail Abdurahman Kenani, Khartoum-based director of the Bible Society in Sudan, said port authorities had been delaying several shipments of Bibles in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea. Besides the shipment detained after Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir began a crack-down on Christian institutions in 2012, another one detained a little over three years ago was among those released in early August, Kenani said.

When a Hindu in northern India got rid of the idols in his house after several visits to a church in July, Hindu nationalists found the perfect opportunity to make life a nightmare for a pastor’s family.

Since the Hindu nationalists accused Pastor Avianshu Kalra of desecration of Hindu idols and forcible conversion, he and his family have had to leave their home, his wife has suffered pregnancy complications, and his father has been suspended from his work as a journalist after a defamation suit.

In an audio recording revealed on 27 August, kidnapped Christian schoolgirl Leah Sharibu appealed to the government of Nigeria to win her release from Islamic extremist group Boko Haram.

Boko Haram released more than 100 schoolgirls about four weeks after kidnapping them in February, but held Leah, 15, because she refused to convert to Islam.

Christians’ confidence in the judiciary in Nepal was shattered after a court sentenced a 63-year-old pastor to ten years in prison on rape accusations that the complainant later renounced, church leaders reported in August.

Pastor Govinda Prasad Dhakal, 63, was sentenced upon conviction for ‘frequently raping a minor’ who he and his wife had adopted in 2016. Christian leaders and his family roundly refute the allegation, citing an attempt by the alleged victim’s family to extort money.

A Hindu extremist sexually assaulted a pastor’s wife during a worship service at a house church in July.

Pratibha Stephen was worshipping at the house church in Tamil Nadu state, India when a man suddenly burst through the back door, shouting angrily.

A pastor in Uttar Pradesh state was filing affidavits on 18 June stating that 16 people had become Christians of their own free will when Hindu extremists came and accused him of forcible conversion, resulting in his incarceration.

After manhandling and jailing 58-year-old Dependra Prakash, the Hindu extremists then went to the 16 new Christians’ homes and threatened to expel them if they did not recant their faith.

A court in Omdurman on 11 April charged four Christians who defended church property from a takeover by a Muslim business interest.

Judge Adam Babiker charged the Christians with causing physical harm to police and supporters of a Muslim businessman who tried to take control of church school property in April 2017. If found guilty they could be sentenced to a fine and a prison term of up to six months.

It was reported in April that, after a pastor suffered a humiliating attack, he said he had ‘found favour in God’s eyes’ as he had been ‘blessed to have suffered for Jesus’ name’.

Hindu nationalists stormed into the house of one of Kumah Masih’s church members in Uttar Pradesh state, and dragged him out to a group of around 50 people outside. He fell on the ground and he lost consciousness as one of the assailants ‘started to hit me between my legs on my private parts’ said the pastor.

After spending more than a year in prison, two assistant pastors arrested by the Myanmar army were released on 17 April under a government amnesty programme.

Dom Dawng Nawng Latt, 65, and La Jaw Gam Hseng, 35, were among more than 8,500 prisoners granted amnesty by newly elected President U Win Myint. Some 37 jailed political activists were also freed under the amnesty, but most of those freed were in prison on drug-related and other crimes.

Islamic extremists, including a family of suicide bombers, targeted three churches on 12 May that killed at least 12 people, not including the assailants.

The father of the family that killed the Christians was the suspected head of the local cell of an Islamic State-inspired network called Jemaah Ansharut Daulah.

A week after a young Muslim in eastern Uganda turned to Christ, relatives attacked him with hot cooking oil on 10 March.

Gobera Bashir, 27, suffered burns on 40% of his body after the attack. He had become a Christian the previous Sunday when attending church with a friend. The pastor had told him to ‘be cautious when reading the Bible, since your family is Muslim’.

Medical staff and security guards at a major government hospital in Lahore, Pakistan killed a Christian father of four and injured five members of his family on 26 March, Morning Star News reported.

Anil Saleem said that he, his brother Sunil and other relatives had taken their pregnant sister Kiran to the emergency labour ward of the Government Services Institute of Medical Sciences because she was suffering labour pains.

The body of a pastor was found hanging from the roof of his house in late January, a week after he complained to police about opposition from Hindu extremists.

Congregation members found Gideon Periyaswamy hanging in his one-room house. It looked as if others had placed him in the noose after his death, due to the way his body hung.

After opposition shut down a meeting centre for Messianic Jews in southern Israel last May, ultra-Orthodox Jews began harassing it again after it re-opened in January.

The ultra-Orthodox Jews protested the presence of the centre and threatened some of the Messianic Jews (Jewish followers of Jesus). The centre, where Messianic Jews meet for conversation, coffee and tea, had been temporarily closed last year due to protests by ultra-Orthodox Jews after which they damaged Messianic Jewish leaders’ homes, breaking windows and traumatising two children inside one home.

Hindu extremists in Chhattisgarh state kept hundreds of Christians from a prayer service on 6 December and attacked those who managed to attend.

At the prayer service where 2,000 people were expected in Tarra Kopra village, Raipur District, only 300 Christians made it past Hindu extremist check-points, said Pastor Lachhan Ram Sahu of Blessing Prayer Hall.

After being framed on false charges of converting Hindus, two Christians in eastern India spent a month in jail where they saw 30 people converted to Christ!

Whilst meeting someone who had contacted Pastor Kumar who claimed they wanted to know about Jesus, the two were questioned about the monetary cost of conversion. As they explained that conversion does not work this way, a group began accusing them of ‘converting’ people and calling for their arrest.

Police arrested Christians on 9 December who were attacked by Hindu nationalists in Tamil Nadu, then tried to portray it as a fight between two parties and ‘false news’.

The Hindu extremists savagely beat four Christians, including a woman whose hand they fractured, for conducting a pre-Christmas charity event for destitute widows. After the attack, one of the victims was taken into custody. Two days before the event, Karthik Chandran, went to the Periyanaickenpalayam police station with an invitation to police to inform them about the church’s pre-Christmas activities.

Hard-line Muslims on the outskirts of Nairobi attacked a Christian widow’s children, ages 13, 17 and 21, leaving two of them seriously injured and still in pain 11 days after the assault on 17 November.

Hadiya (surname withheld), an immigrant from Somalia (where all Somalis are assumed Muslim), had not yet returned from a trip to a funeral when the assailants of Somali descent broke into her home at 5.30am.

A church elder in Plateau State, Nigeria saw Muslim Fulani herdsmen storm into his village at 11pm on 13 October, shooting in all directions.

‘Every one of us ran to save his life,’ Dauda Samuel Kadiya, 38, of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) in Zanwrua said. ‘I was shot at, but the bullet only bruised my hand.’

Officials and police in Tamil Nadu state, India, ordered ten churches to discontinue worship services in mid-October.

Hindu extremists compelled state officials and police to issue orders to the churches in Coimbatore District to stop worship unless they obtain permission from the collector’s office. It was reported that the extremists intend to target 20 others in the same way.

A pastor in Uttar Pradesh has forgiven his attackers despite losing hearing in one ear after Hindu extremists tortured him, pressured police to falsely charge him and prevented doctors from treating him in late September.

Pastor Abhay Sagar, 37, of Biswan town in Sitapur District, was about to begin preaching when he was attacked. 25 men from Hindu extremist groups Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad barged into the schoolroom where the congregation was meeting, according to the pastor’s wife.

A Christian woman and her two children were killed in north-central Nigeria on 24 October.

Armed Muslim Fulani herdsmen ambushed and shot to death Rebecca Daniel Choji, her 16-year-old daughter Suzanna Daniel Choji, and her 29-year-old son Joel Choji, in Jol village, Riyom Local Government Area (LGA) in Plateau State, as the family members were on their way to a health facility in Vwak village.

China tightened its ‘choke-hold’ on churches across the country in recent months, according to China Aid.

Bans on unregistered church worship and on teaching Christianity to children, ‘as if intending to eliminate all house churches at once,’ have startled Christians.

In further efforts to help a Muslim businessman take over church property, police in Omdurman evicted two church leaders and their families from their houses on 15 August.

This was the latest show of force in a government-aided bid to help Muslim businessman Hisham Hamad Al-Neel take over the church property for investment. Police told the pastors they were carrying out a court order. The families, who remain homeless and are living on the street, said they were terrified when police pounded on the doors shouting threats.

A woman in eastern Uganda who put her faith in Christ on 7 August went into hiding after her husband beat her for leaving Islam.

Sophia Nakisaala, 35, turned to Christ after her daughter was healed when a street preacher she had heard in Bulopa village, Kamuli District, prayed for her.

A band of Hindu extremists beat a house church pastor with steel rods and sticks on 16 August, one of them yelling that they would stop if pastor Sethi said, ‘Hail, Lord Ram [Jai Sri Ram]’.

The pastor said he kept quiet despite the pain of suffering leg and head injuries. ‘I am glad the Lord considered me worthy to share his pain,’ he said.

The body of a Christian mother of three, who died in detention in Eritrea in August, showed signs of torture that could have contributed to her death.

Eritrean authorities arrested Fikadu Debesay and her husband in the southern town of Adi Quala as part of a crackdown in May, when at least 122 Christians were detained for worshipping in unregistered churches. She died in detention north of the capital, Asmara, at Metkel Abiet, a camp in the Northern Red Sea Region where prisoners are held in harsh desert heat.

About 150 angry Buddhists and monks attacked newly-converted Christians in Burma in July, destroying their homes and property and injuring seven people.

In a village in North West Burma’s Sagaing Region, the mob threw stones and broke into houses two days after two families put their trust in Christ and left Buddhism. Four women and three men were hit with stones and sticks and suffered injuries on their heads, faces and backs. Three motorbikes were destroyed.

A young Coptic woman in a suburb of Cairo disappeared, on 5 June, from an area where Muslim attacks against Christians have surged.

Suzan Ashraf Rawy, 22, left for work by foot from her home in Al Khosous, but never arrived at the Coptic Orthodox church where she is employed. ‘When she did not return home that evening, her mother called the church’, an area Christian leader said. ‘That is when she discovered Suzan did not arrive at the church in the morning. It is expected that she has been abducted.’

Gruesome violence against Muslims accused of blasphemy in Pakistan reignited calls in mid-April for amending blasphemy statutes commonly used to persecute Christians.

The lynching of a Muslim student over blasphemy charges at a university in northwestern Pakistan, the murder of a blasphemy accused Muslim in Punjab Province and mob violence against a mentally-challenged Muslim on similar accusations have compelled officials at high levels to call for changes in the widely condemned statutes.

A Christian in Jharkhand state, India succumbed, in late January, to illnesses incurred when villagers immersed him and his wife in freezing water because they refused to deny Christ.

‘The villagers kept asking my father if he is ready to forsake Christ. He reiterated every time, ‘I will not deny Christ … I will continue to believe till my last breath,’ said Urawn’s son. Previous to the torture, villagers had forced Urawn to attend their worship, in which they sacrificed an animal, his son said. They forced a portion of the sacrifice down his throat and made him drink fermented liquor, he said.

Hundreds of Christians left the Egyptian town of Al-Arish in northern Sinai after the third Copt in a week was gunned down on 23 February, reportedly by militants linked to so-called Islamic State (IS).

The mass exodus comes after three Coptic Christians were killed in what appears to be the work of militants making good on IS threats issued on a 19 February video promising to rid the country of ‘idolaters’. The latest slaying was the seventh killing of a Copt in Sinai in a month.

Islamic extremists in Somalia, identified as Al Shabaab rebels, shot to death an underground Christian woman and her son and seriously wounded her husband in February.

The family was asleep at their home in Afgoi, about 30 km west of Mogadishu, when at least four armed men attacked them shouting the jihadist slogan ‘Allah Akbar [God is greater]’ and ‘We cannot allow the defiling of our religion with a foreign, Western religion,’ said family head Suleiman Abdiwahab.

After a pastor fell into a coma following harassment by hard-line Hindus in southern India, a gang of Hindu extremists in the same state beat another pastor after he prayed for healing at the home of an elderly church member, in January.

Police altered the statement of the Revd Gandham Padma Rao, 49, so that the ten young men who assaulted him were described only as drunken youths, not members of a Hindu nationalist group, as the pastor had stated.

Months after Hindu extremists and police attacked a revival meeting in northern India and shut down a church, one pastor is in hiding and officers prohibit another from praying with members of the scattered congregation in their homes, it was reported in late January.

Members of the once-thriving church, where evangelistic events used to draw crowds of 5,000 people, either travel long distances to worship or are meeting secretly in homes.

Muslims in eastern Uganda beat Christians at a Christmas Day service and wrecked the home of a single mother on Christmas Eve.

Nineteen masked Muslims entered a church compound chanting the jihadist slogan ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Away from here, this village is not for Christians, but for Allah’ during a Sunday service.

A pastor in southwestern China – jailed for nearly a year on fabricated charges and suffering a liver disease – focussed on trusting God in a November letter of encouragement to his wife.

Authorities took Pastor Li Guozhi, better known as Yang Hua, into custody after a raid on his church in central Guizhou Province in December 2015. In a letter to his wife, Wang Hongwu, Pastor Yang encourages her to focus more on God than on the ‘noise’ of humanity.

On 25 November, a court in Lahore handed the death sentence to five Muslims for torturing and killing a Christian couple by burning them alive in a brick kiln over allegations of burning the Qur’an.

Eight others charged in the attack were sentenced to two years in prison.

The daughter of an Algerian Christian sentenced to three years in prison on a charge of blaspheming Islam fears for his life, it was reported in late November.

Muslim prisoners reportedly planned to beat Slimane Bouhafs, 49, for defending his faith and his health has faltered due to lack of medical care. A group of inmates planned to attack Bouhafs because he objected to the views of an imam who publicly insulted Christians and Christianity in Algeria.

A Christian family of six and ten other relatives are facing hunger and illness in Chiapas, Mexico after local officials drove them from their land for non-compliance with a ‘traditionalist’ mix of indigenous pagan and Catholic rituals, it was reported at the end of October.

The family patriarch, identified only as Fernando H., put his trust in Christ in 2008, and soon local authorities began devising plans to pressure his family and force them to leave their native village (undisclosed for security reasons) near Las Margaritas, Christian news portal Noticiero Milamex reported.

On 14 November a judge in eastern Sudan ordered a Christian school, that had been taken over by government officials, to resume classes under the prior Christian administration, according to the headmaster.

The Appeal Court for Administrative Affairs in Madani, Al Jazirah state, thus cancelled an order by the Madani commissioner calling for the closure of the Evangelical Basic School, which armed police along with civilians from Khartoum and elsewhere had seized on 24 October, said the Revd Samuel Suleiman Anglo, headmaster at the school.

In eastern Uganda in a predominantly Muslim village on 6 October, a mob of armed jihadists injured 27 Christians working at a food-producing project because people were coming to Christ through the outreach.

As they harvested rice, 16 of the 27 wounded Christians were seriously injured when the Islamists, invoking jihad in Arabic, descended on them.

Muslims in a village in eastern Uganda gutted the home of a Christian family on 30 October for housing two boys threatened with violence for leaving Islam.

The two teenage boys sought refuge after their parents learned of their conversion and threatened to kill those who had been involved in the conversions. The two boys, aged 16 and 17, had secretly become Christians nearly seven months before.

Hindu extremists in Maharashtra state beat and threatened to burn a pastor who went on to say that he could ‘see the love and the faithfulness of God more through this incident’, it was reported in late October.

Pastor Prashant Bhatnager, 45, is still recovering from broken hand, arm and leg bones, after six men beat and urinated on him.

A Muslim in Uganda beat his wife unconscious for attending a church service on 18 September.

Hussein Kasolo had recently married Fatuma Baluka, 21-year-old daughter of an Islamic leader in a predominantly Muslim village in Eastern Uganda.

Authorities in southeastern Sudan arrested the headmaster of a Christian school on 5 September and took over its property.

Armed police and officials from the National Intelligence and Security Services arrested the Rev Samuel Suliman and 12 teachers at the school in Madani, capital of Al Jazirah state. The Christians were accused of supporting the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N), a rebel group fighting government forces.

Christian workers imprisoned under charges related to tarnishing Sudan’s image are innocent, it was said in court in late September, but their arrests serve the Sudanese Government as a warning to others against criticising the Islamist regime.

As part of a recent upsurge in harassment of Christians, Sudan accused two Sudanese pastors, arrested in 2015, and a foreign aid worker of ‘waging war against the state’ and spying in the course of allegedly gathering information on persecution of Christians and on bombing of civilians in the Nuba Mountains.

Contrary to the state government version of an attack in north-western Nigeria on 22 August, a Christian at the school where Muslim students killed eight people said all the victims were Christians.

According to another Christian student, the Christian student at Abdu Gusau Polytechnic, in Talata Mafara, Zamfara state, who was said to have triggered the attack by blaspheming, was falsely accused. ‘The claim that our colleague blasphemed Muhammad is not true’, he said of the convert, who was badly beaten and left for dead. ‘He has been the target of Muslims here, as they believe that anyone who leaves Islam must be killed.

Converts to non-Islamic faiths in Malaysia can be detained for more than three months in ‘Faith Purification Centres’, according to a report released in July.

And there are growing concerns that the impact of Shari’a courts and use of these camps could expand as strict Islam gains traction in the country.

One Christian is dead, several others were wounded and a fire gutted a church building, after Muslims across Egypt waged a weekend of violence against Copts in July.

In Tahana El-Gabal village in Minya Governorate on 17 July Fam Mary Khalaf, 27, was overpowered by a group of Muslims who stabbed him repeatedly in the chest. One of the knife stabs went directly into his heart, killing him instantly, a statement from the local parish reported.

On the evening of 5 May, Pastor Dang Ba Nham, his wife, and a church elder were praying on a roadside with a woman who had recently converted to Christianity in Vinh on the north central coast of Vietnam.

They stood in front of the property of the new Christian, Phan Thi Thanh Huyen, to ask God for his blessing in building a new house. As they were praying, a large pick-up truck with red military plates veered across the street and ploughed squarely into the small group.

Nigerian officials scrambled to calm religious tensions after Muslims in Kano state killed a Christian pastor’s wife on a baseless ‘blasphemy’ charge on 2 June.

Bridget Agbahime, a kitchen utensil vendor at Kano city’s Kofar Wambai Market, politely asked a Muslim engaged in ritual Islamic cleansing, identified as Alhaji Dauda, to move his ritual from her shop front. She had had similar conflicts with him before.

Muslims in eastern Uganda in April beat and raped a young Christian woman for testifying that a mosque leader had killed her father because of his faith.

On 28 January, Samson Mukama (40) was killed at the family house in Kashebai, Pallisa District, by Sheikh Musana Ibrahim, the imam at a mosque in Kanyumu village, Pallisa District, with two other Muslims.

Muslims in Pakistan have told 300 impoverished villagers they must either produce a Christian accused of blasphemy, leave the area, convert to Islam or be killed.

Imran Masih, a 28-year-old resident of Chak 44 village in Punjab Province’s Mandi Bahauddin District, was accused on April 19 of keeping a ‘blasphemous’ video clip on his cell phone. Tensions flared after local Islamists issued a Fatwa (Islamic edict) against Masih and sanctioned his killing. Masih, a sweeper at a rural health centre in nearby Bosaal, and his family have since fled the village. Some 44 Christian families are now left at the mercy of the 2,000-plus Muslim population, which has imposed a social boycott on the community after police thwarted an attempt to burn down their homes on May 6.

Striving for a peaceful legacy, Christians in Burma (also called Myanmar) are choosing to patiently endure an influential Buddhist monk’s campaign to build pagodas on church properties, it was reported in April.

Initially social and news media registered an outcry from Christians when U Thuzana, a powerful monk better known as Myaing Kyee Ngu Sayadaw, rallied supporters to build a Buddhist pagoda on Anglican church property in south-eastern Karen state on 23 April.

Two of three pastors kidnapped in north-central Nigeria on 21 March have been released, while the third died after being left in the wild.

The Revd Iliya Anto was found dead in the bush ten days after the abduction, said the Revd Jibrailu Wobiya, general secretary of the United Church of Christ in Nigeria. Anto was a pastor in Kaduna city.

The family of a Coptic Christian soldier in the Egyptian army, who died under suspicious circumstances in February, is demanding an autopsy.

On 17 February, the Egyptian military informed the family of Michael Gamel Mansour that the 22-year-old conscript from Assuit had committed suicide. They claimed Mansour shot himself. They asserted that moments before his suicide, Mansour became despondent after a family telephone conversation.

Four men detained by police for attacking a church building in the Black Sea region of Turkey last week shouted jihadist slogans when released from jail, a marked departure from past harassment, church leaders said.

Shortly after 11.30pm on 25 February, the four Muslims went to a building rented by the Agape Church Foundation in Samsun and tried to get someone to come to the door. Initially two of the four men rang the doorbell on the building, used by the church group for worship and teaching, but seconds later two others arrived who began banging on the door with their fists and then tried to kick the door open.

When Mohammed Nsera graduated from high school last year, his Muslim family built a small house for him on their homestead in eastern Uganda.

Nsera’s family lives in the predominantly Christian village of Katende near Busede, Jinja District, some 50 miles east of the Ugandan capital of Kampala. Part of a hard-line Islamic minority, his family strongly objected to his conversion in January. The young man’s father and uncle went to his house to confirm the allegation that he had left Islam.

Suicide attacks on two predominantly Christian communities in northeast Nigeria on 27 and 29 January left at least 26 dead and dozens injured.

In Chibok, Borno state, suicide bombers, suspected to have been sent by Boko Haram, bombed a crowded market on 27 January, killing at least 17 civilians and a soldier and injuring at least 30 others. Following the government troop recovery of the town, the market had reopened that day for the first time since Boko Haram took over Chibok two years ago.

A pastor in northern India, who was beaten and paraded through streets with his head half-shaved as crowds called for him to be cut to pieces, said he is thankful that he was counted worthy to suffer for the name of Christ.

On 29 January, Hindu extremists posing as policemen picked up Avdhesh Savita, a 35-year-old father of four, from his home in Rendhar village in Uttar Pradesh state and took him to Orai, Jalaun District. They beat him, shaved half of his head, one eyebrow and one side of his moustache, and put him on a donkey as they led him in a procession through Orai. They and others in the frenzied crowd mocked him, falsely accusing him of forcible conversion.

Two Nigerian pastors were abducted in Kogi state in January, as kidnapping cartels that have plagued the central state for the past three years directed their aim at Christian leaders.

In a departure from numerous kidnappings of high-profile business and government leaders in Kogi state since 2013, gunmen abducted Pastor David Onubedo of Deeper Life Bible Church on 25 January in Okene after a Bible study. Onubedo’s captors are reported to have contacted his wife and the leadership of the church to demand 50 million naira (£173,000) for his release.

Muslim extremists from Sudan were arrested in January in connection with the burning of a church building in South Sudan.

Members of the Sudanese Church of Christ (SCOC) in the refugee settlement of Yida awoke on the morning of 16 January to find their worship building in flames. Tens of thousands of refugees from Sudan’s South Kordofan state have set up homes in Yida, about seven miles from the Sudanese border.

Christians on the island of Mindanao believe insurgents with the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, were responsible for shooting Pastor Feliciano ‘Cris’ Lasawang (50) and his 24-year-old son Darwin as they bathed in the Culaman River north of Jose Abad Santos, Davao del Sur Province, early one morning in November.

Pastor Lasawang was shot three times in the body and his son once in the face. The two men died at the site. They had conducted baptisms in the same river where they died, according to US-based Christian Aid Mission, which assists native ministries around the world. NPA rebels are suspected because the guerrillas believe church growth dampens insurgent recruitment efforts, and the pastor had received reports that the Communist militants were monitoring his movements.

Amid ongoing dangers, Christian leaders in Nigeria in October recalled the exemplary faith of indigenous missionaries who gave their lives in areas overrun by Islamic extremist militants.

While President Muhammadu Buhari told an India-African summit in late October that Islamic extremist group Boko Haram has been contained to ‘sporadic’ attacks in remote areas, leaders of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) told how Nigerian missionaries sent to those areas have suffered.

In Kasur District’s Pernawa area, Muslim teachers at a government high school on 5 October assaulted a Christian headmaster who reportedly refused to agree to their demands.

Muslim teachers at Pernawa Government High School first pressured headmaster Saddique Azam to resign, saying that they refused to accept a government-imposed choora, a derogatory term referring to impoverished Christian street sweepers, to supervise them. They then reportedly told Azam that the only way he could continue as head teacher was to become a puppet in their hands.

An attack on a prayer meeting in Jharkhand state that sent six people to the hospital on 4 September began when Hindu women entered the home where it was held and began insulting Christians.

By the end of the day, Hindu extremists with guns, axes, spades and clubs had broken the bones of Christians and beaten women unconscious, before threatening to finish them off if they continued worshipping Christ, a local pastor said.

An Egyptian Christian, arrested on 7 August for alleged evangelising of Muslims in suburban Cairo, could be held indefinite-ly in prison on a false accusation of blasphemy, his lawyer said.

Medhat Ishak, a 35-year-old Christian from Ebid village in Minya Governorate, was arrested while handing out Bibles and accused of evangelism.

Namumbeiza Swabura, mother of 11 children, including a five-month-old baby, died on 17 June in Nabuli village, Kibuku District, after her sister-in-law visited and offered to prepare a light meal of cooked plantain for her.

Swabura and her husband, former sheikh (Islamic teacher) Mugoya Muhammad, put their faith in Christ in August 2014. Her husband’s sister, Jafaran Wowa, of Kanyolo village, visited her and prepared a dish of plantain. Wowa, who did not eat any of the dish, left soon after Swabura finished it. Stomach pain started immediately and two hours later Swabura died. Her sister-in-law has gone into hiding.

The Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL), proposed by President Benigno Aquino III last September with the aim of ending decades of Islamist rebel violence in Mindanao, was approved by a House Ad Hoc Committee on 20 May, with 50 members voting yes, 17 voting no and one abstaining.

The area, comprising five provinces with sizeable non-Muslim populations, already enjoys a measure of autonomy as the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), and the proposed BBL would give leaders sufficient independence to impose shari’a law. Christians and others in the southern Philippines have expressed strong fears that this legislation, effectively creating an Islamic sub-state on Mindanao Island, will exacerbate religious tensions rather than resolve them.

Christians sustained broken bones and wounds on 8 April when Hindu extremists attacked an open-air gospel event in Telangana state, India.

Police initially refused to help church members after the mob of about 100 Hindu extremists seriously injured four Christians in the attack. Area church leaders submitted a complaint citing inaction by police.

First an 18-year-old Sudanese Muslim became a refugee from Sudan’s war-torn South Kordofan state; then he received Christ and became a refugee from his family.

Kuku (full name withheld) and his family, ethnic Nuba from the Kauda area, arrived at Yida refugee camp in South Sudan in 2011, shortly after military conflict broke out in South Kordofan. The Sudanese Air Force has routinely bombed civilian targets in its battle with area rebels.

Persecution of Christians in China reached its highest level in more than a decade last year, as the government cracked down on church growth perceived as a threat to Communist Party power.

Texas-based China Aid Association (CAA) reported 572 cases of religious – mainly Christian – persecution last year, a 300% increase over the previous year’s 143 cases. The number of people affected in those cases jumped from 7,424 to 17,884 people. More than 1,592 were church leaders, compared with 800 the previous year.

Two Muslim girls who put their faith in Christ on 1 February were beaten and locked in a room without food for nearly three days.

Kakongoka Ahamadah had taken custody of Nabagabana Fatuma (14) and her sister Namwase Aisha (16) after the death of their father five years ago. The girls’ father had retained custody after divorcing their mother two years before he died. Their home is in Nasenye village, Pallisa District in eastern Uganda.

On 7 March the Free Methodist Church USA announced the release of its kidnapped missionary in Nigeria, Phyllis Sortor.

In a statement signed on behalf of the Board of Bishops of the church, David W. Kendall said 71-year-old Sortor was released by her captors on Friday evening, 6 March. He said armed gunmen abducted Sortor on 23 February from Hope Academy school in Emi-Oworo village in the central Nigerian state of Kogi.

Turkish authorities are searching for a suspected arsonist following a fire that destroyed thousands of New Testaments and other Christian books on 7 December.

The fire started at the offices of the Bible Correspondence Course in Turkey (BCC Turkey), located in a multistorey building that also houses a church in the Kadikoy neighbourhood of Istanbul. No one was injured in the fire and no structural damage was reported, but total losses are estimated at approximately US$12,500.

African shamans wielding clubs and stones stormed a church on a Ugandan island in Lake Victoria on 22 December, sending 30 Christians to hospitals for treatment.

The unruly sorcerers destroyed dozens of Bibles, broke chairs, doors, the front part of the building and other property as church members who were not injured fled for their lives. The pastor said: ‘Church members were beaten with sticks and clubs, and police arrived to rescue the people, who were rushed to nearby clinics.’ The shamans, leaders of traditional animist and spiritist practice, also damaged keyboards, microphones and loudspeakers.

Security personnel in Sudan have held a pastor from South Sudan since 21 December, after he delivered a sermon at an embattled North Khartoum church.

Agents from Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) arrested the Revd Yat Michael of the South Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church after Sunday worship concluded.

A pastor in Kenya of Somali descent, whom Islamic extremist Al Shabaab militants have threatened for leaving Islam, fears he soon could be killed, it was reported in mid-December.

Somali Al Shabaab rebels have offered a reward to anyone who kills the Revd Mahad H. Birik and, after a video of him describing his conversion from Islam seeped into major Somali broadcast, web and print media two months ago, the pastor (of an undisclosed church on the outskirts of Nairobi) said long-standing threats on his life became concrete.

Churchwomen wailed and young men shouted that they were prepared to die to prevent further demolition, as hundreds of Christians in North Khartoum blocked authorities’ attempts to destroy buildings on their compound on 17 and 18 November.

After a bulldozer accompanied by police knocked down a wall of the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church’s (SPEC) Khartoum Bahri Evangelical Church and some houses, the Christians formed a human barrier to face down further demolition attempts the following two days. One of the homes destroyed in the compound belonged to Nile Theological College; a Christian doctor had rented it and he lost all his belongings.

Islamic extremists from the Somali insurgent Al Shabaab stopped a bus in northern Kenya on 22 November, separated out the non-Muslims and killed 28 people.

A Christian on the bus to Nairobi said he was spared because he could recite some Quranic verses; he watched as the Islamic extremists ordered the 19 men and nine women identified as non-Muslims to lie on the ground and shot them in the head.

Attacks on Christians in Chhattisgarh on 25 October have raised suspicions that local officials are collaborating with Hindu extremists, church leaders said.

Local officials summoned area Christians to a meeting in Madota village on the pretext of resolving conflict over bans in the district on missionaries and non-Hindu religious activity.

Commanded from mosque loudspeakers, a Muslim throng in Punjab Province killed a Christian couple on 4 November after a coworker accused the pregnant wife of defiling the Qur’an.

Living on the premises of the brick kiln where she worked just southwest of Lahore, Shama Bibi was beaten to death before the enraged mob threw her body into the kiln, a relative said. The 28-year-old mother of four children was five months pregnant. Her husband, Shahzad Masih, was also beaten, but was still alive when he was thrown into the kiln with his wife’s body. He was 32.

Armed Muslim extremists stormed two churches in Taraba state on 19 October and killed 31 people as they worshipped, a church leader said.

Two pastors, one pastor’s son, and 28 other Christians were slain in the attacks in the villages of Gindin Waya and Sondi, said the Revd Caleb Ahema, president of the Christian Reformed Church of Christ in Nigeria. Ahema said the onslaught was the seventh attack on Christian communities in Wukari Local Government Area since February.

Gao Zhisheng, released from prison on August 7, has been left unable to speak coherently after his imprisonment on charges of subversion.

Once released, his family – now living in the USA – had telephone conversations with him. But after some phone calls in which he said very little, his wife wasn’t sure whether he was still in too much pain to talk or had forgotten how.

Ethnic Fulani gunmen shouting the jihadist chant ‘Allahu Akbar’ attacked three villages in Nigeria’s Plateau, burning down a church building and killing at least ten Christians, on September 14.

Five members of the Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN) were shot in their homes reported the Revd Manasseh Duwong of the COCIN congregation in Mbar. ‘They were shouting “God is greater” and also saying: “We must wipe out these infidel Christians today’’ ’, Duwong said.

A British messianic Jew deported from Israel last year for participating in an evangelistic outreach to Jews confirmed that he will appeal his case to the nation’s supreme court, it was reported in early October.

Barry Barnett, 50, left the country in December 2013 under a deportation order issued by Israel’s Ministry of the Interior. He was banned from the country for ten years. Barnett was arrested near the city of Be’er Shiva by immigration enforcement officers at a Jews for Jesus ‘Behold your God Israel’ campaign.

In the latest of several attacks on a congregation in East Jerusalem, young men with ties to a Palestinian militant group wired shut a church door and sprayed a gaseous substance at those inside hours before dawn on September 29.

No one was injured, as those sleeping or keeping vigil fled into a hallway before the chemical spray could impair breathing, but it was the second gas attack in two weeks, said Living Bread Church leader Karen Dunham. On September 17, a man passing by the church’s patio area opened a plastic bag containing a small gas canister. Within seconds, people on the porch were unable to breathe and fled into the church building, only to find that someone had pumped the same chemical spray into the worship hall.

Leaders of north eastern Nigeria’s Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (EYN) said Boko Haram attacks, that have killed more than 300 Christians at the start of September, have forced the temporary closure of Kulp Bible College and many churches.

In an emergency prayer message, EYN president Samuel Dali said that the headquarters of the church is under grave threat from the Islamic extremist insurgents who shari’a seek to impose (Islamic law) throughout the country.

After seven years of harassment by hard-line Muslims, a Palestinian church in East Jerusalem has been forced out of their building, church leaders said in late August.

The congregation of Calvary Baptist Church, under Holy Land Missions, moved out of their building in the Shofat area of Jerusalem in July after Islamists threatened their landlord. They are looking for a safer, more permanent place to meet.

On August 29, police in Pakistan arrested a Christian convert from Hinduism and his Hindu co-worker for allegedly burning a Qur’an and a chart of Qur’anic verses.

The Christian’s family and attorney said, however, that Islamist extremist groups have falsely accused the two men in response to an increasing number of Hindus converting to Christianity in southern Punjab Province.

On September 10, a court in Bhutan sentenced pastor Tandin Wangyal to three years, 11 months in prison for receiving funds for ministry activities from a foreign Christian organisation.

The court asserts that the pastor received US$11,864 to conduct training and spread Christianity. Wangyal was convicted under Article 71 of the Civil Society Organisation Act of Bhutan, which outlaws raising funds for activities ‘in contravention of the laws of the country’ and without prior permission.

The family of a Christian convert has admitted to replacing cooking oil with petrol to kill a mother as she prepared breakfast for her four children, it was reported in late August.

Her husband rushed to her aid, as did her 16-year-old son, but despite their efforts she died two weeks later as a result of her burns. The family members admitted their part in the murder to the woman’s husband as he returned from the hospital after her death, stating that they did it to punish them. Her husband knows that the punishment was because he and his wife would not return to Islam.

Security agents in Sudan padlocked a 500member church building on August 24, said Christian sources, who fear the government may try to sell it.

In the latest incident in a nearly two-year wave of church demolitions, closures and confiscations, Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) forcibly closed the Sudan Pentecostal Church’s (SPC’s) building in Khartoum, which houses the Khartoum Christian Center (KCC).

A Coptic woman has lost her appeal of what human rights activists call a false conviction for blaspheming Islam and was sentenced, on June 15, to six months in an Egyptian prison.

The appellate court ruling shocked the Christian woman, 25-year-old Demyana Abd al-Nour, her family and human rights advocates. As Al-Nour fled the country last year, the ruling practically guarantees that she will spend the rest of her life in exile from Egypt.

Hassan Muwanguzi, poisoned earlier this year by Muslim relatives, did not expect the Muslim extremists who threatened to kill him on June 16 to murder his 12-year-old daughter on June 25.

Muwanguzi did not recognize the four men who appeared at his door and forced their way into his home in Katira, outside Mbale in eastern Uganda, with one shouting: ‘Today we shall kill you. You have been a trouble-maker and are not respecting our prophet’s religion’.

In the town of El Gadarif, on Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia, another Christian woman has been incarcerated in April under suspicion of having left Islam.

Immigration/Citizenship police questioned Faiza Abdalla, 37, as she was going to obtain her national identification number at an official building in El Gadarif on April 2. When she responded to officers’ questions about her religion that she was a Christian, they immediately arrested her based on her Muslim name, he said.

A Christian convert of Somali descent in Kenya said he is concerned that Muslims who stabbed him in Nairobi have been released from jail as they await trial, it was reported in late May.

Mohamud Yusuf Ahmed said that Ahmed Ali Mohammed and Issa Shidane Quru, also of Somali descent, stabbed him in February after threatening to kill him, saying: ‘You infidel, you are not supposed to be alive and we must kill you’.

A Turkish legislator is demanding an investigation into why the website of at least one Turkish church was labelled pornography and blocked from computers at Turkey’s Grand National Assembly (TBMM) on May 28.

While doing research for a trip to Diyarbakir, Aykan Erdemir, a legislator from Bursa with the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), discovered that the website for Diyarbakir Church could not be accessed by members of the TBMM (or parliament).

Prosecutors in this tiny Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas have, in late May, charged one of two pastors arrested in March with illegally collecting funds and have dropped charges against both men of lacking permission to screen a film, sources said.

The Office of the Attorney General in April charged M.B. Thapa, known as Lobzang, and Tandin Wangyal with attempting to screen a film and illegally collecting funds after no evidence was found to charge them with proselytising, as the home and cultural affairs minister had initially sought. A trial court earlier in May dismissed the film screening charge, relieving Lobzang of both charges, while Wangyal was called for two evidence hearings about findings on his laptop.

Underground Christians in Somalia are struggling to recover from the loss of a prominent church leader gunned down in March of this year.

As in many cases of the mounting number of murders of secret Christians in Somalia, Islamic extremists with the Al Shabaab rebel group were suspected in the March 16 shooting of Abdishakur Yusuf on the outskirts of the capital Mogadishu. A leader of five underground groups in a country where leaving Islam is punishable by death, Yusuf’s prominence made publication of his death at the time too raw for the many who knew him, but they have granted permission now as they seek the prayers of brethren worldwide.

In late May, lawyers for a Muslim accused of stabbing a Coptic woman to death in Egypt are persisting with a claim of innocence by reason of insanity, in spite of a psychiatric evaluation that found he was fit to stand trial.

Confirming fears of human rights activists who said attorneys for Mahmoud Mohamed Ali would use a tactic that has freed other Muslims from punishment for premeditated, religiously motivated murder, the lawyers are challenging results of the evaluation.

A Coptic Christian teacher in Egypt, allegedly shot by the teenage brother of one of his students, died on April 8, seven days after the shooting.

Ashraf Alahm Atef Hanna was an English teacher at Marzouk Prep School in the village of Marzouk in Minya Province.

A former sheikh who converted to Christianity in Uganda has again suffered for his faith. In the latest attack, his Muslim relatives apparently tried to kill him with poison in late April.

Since Hassan Muwanguzi became a Christian in 2003, he has lost his wife and his job as a school teacher, been beaten by his family, been falsely accused of a criminal offence, been ordered to shut the Christian school he had opened, had his home burned down and been threatened with death.

It was reported in April that Eritrea is persecuting officially recognised religious bodies, as five Christians set to be ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church were arrested.

The Christian support organisation announced that security officials in the capital, Asmara, arrested Petros Yosief, Bemnet Tesfay, Aklilu Tesfay, Ermias Hadgu and Aron Mehretu. The arrests came shortly after the church announced they would be ordained for pastoral ministry.

Inciting social hostility appears to have become a key way government officials in rural Vietnam try to contain, or at least slow, the growth of Christianity among ethnic minorities, sources said, as ethnic Hmong Christians were the targets of two incidents in February and March in Vietnam’s northwest.

Village officials in Son La Province dragged a couple from their home in late March, and in February authorities in neighbouring Dien Bien Province incited a mob to beat a Christian family – including a 9-year-old girl – and drive them from the village.

Opponents of a European initiative paving the way for governments to rule on the legitimacy of religious groups and reduce home schooling rights won a battle in mid April in the Council of Europe.

In Europe, where public education often includes teachings on morality at odds with churches and officially unrecognised religious groups are labelled sects, the stakes were high at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

A convert from Islam in Iran sentenced to serve almost four years in prison for Christian activities, began a hunger strike on March 20 to protest the government’s refusal to grant his request for release.

Vahid Hakkani began his hunger strike after authorities denied him the conditional release that inmates are eligible to obtain after completing half their prison terms. A researcher and advocate for Middle East Concern said that the willingness of Hakkani to possibly starve himself to death is a reflection of the conditions religious prisoners in Iran face.

An Egyptian Christian shot in the head by a suspected Islamic extremist in Libya succumbed to his injuries at home in Egypt on March 15.

His family moved him back to Egypt against a doctor’s recommendation; the injury had left him in a coma until his death.

More than two dozen Christian converts in a village in southern Laos could be expelled for their faith if government officials fail to keep local authorities from violating their constitutional rights it was reported in March.

The Christians from eight families in Natahall village, in Savannakhet Province’s Phin District, were told to recant their faith at the end of 2013. Local officials sent an eviction order to five Christian families. The village chief publicly declared that the Christian families who had converted to Christianity would be held responsible for any deaths villagers might suffer as a result of spirits angered by violation of traditional beliefs and customs. Animism and ancestor worship are prevalent across Laos.

A mother of two and her cousin were publicly executed by beheading on March 4 after al-Shabaab militants found out they were Christians.

Residents were called to witness the executions of Sadia and Osman. Sadia’s two daughters, aged 8 and 15, were among those subjected to the gruesome spectacle; the youngest cried out for someone to save her mother. The girls have been left orphans as their father died after falling ill in 2011. Fearing for their safety, a family friend has helped them to relocate to a different area.

An Islamist militia behind prior attacks in Libya is thought to be responsible for the execution-style shootings of seven Egyptian Christians found on February 24, east of Benghazi.

The militia, Ansar al-Sharia, has offered a reward to Benghazi residents who help them round up the rest of the Libyan capital’s Christians, according to rights groups.

Sudanese authorities arrested a pastor in Omdurman as he was preaching on February 23 and threatened that he would ‘face justice’ unless he resigned his position.

Personnel from the Criminal Investigation Department entered the compound of Omdurman Evangelical Church and arrested the Rev. Yahya Abdelrahim Nalu as part of a government plan to take over properties of the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church.

Sudanese authorities demolished a church building in Omdurman without prior notice on February 17.

In what Sudanese Christians believe is part of a campaign by Islamist President Omar al-Bashir to rid the country of Christianity, bulldozers, accompanied by local police, destroyed the Sudanese Church of Christ building in the Ombada area of Omdurman, across the River Nile from Khartoum.

A small church in Central Java, Indonesia, that has struggled for more than a decade to keep its worship facility, celebrated a reopening in early December only to see it shut before Christmas, due to protests from hard-line Islamists.

The 41 Christians of the rural church in Pepanthan Dermolo village began worship-ing again in the building Islamic extremists had long denied them. Two weeks later, they did not dare meet there, due to threat of violence from a local group called the Muslim Solidarity Forum of Dermolo.

While Christians fear that government compliance with Pakistan’s Federal Shariat Court’s (FSC) order given on December 4 to remove life imprisonment as a punishment for insulting Muhammad could usher in a new era of persecution, some critics said the greater concern is that it could broaden the powers of the controversial court.

Section 295-C of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws calls for either death or life imprisonment for persons convicted of insulting Muhammad. The FSC has given the government a ‘couple of months’ to implement, through parliament, the order to remove life imprisonment as a possible punishment. The FSC order comes less than three years after assassinations of two government officials silenced most criticism of the blasphemy laws.

On December 13, the Cimahi municipal government sealed a church building, located in a housing subdivision, with a sign hanging on the gateway stating: ‘This building is for a residence and may not be used for worship services or similar activities’, leaving its pastor Titus distressed.

Church officials had long ago applied for a permit, with the application delayed in bureaucracy without explanation, as commonly happens to Christian attempts in Indonesia. The building had been used for worship for decades without any objection from the surrounding community.

Christians in southern Colombia are living in constant danger from a guerrilla army that has banned worship services in rural areas under its control, it was reported on December 18.

An estimated 150 churches have been forced to close since July, when the 32nd Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP in Spanish) launched a repressive campaign against Roman Catholic and evangelical churches in the state of Putumayo.

After gunmen killed five children and an adult in central Nigeria’s Plateau state on December 17, there are indications that Muslim Fulani herdsmen are working with Islamic extremist groups made up in part of foreigners.

Boko Haram, a Nigerian rebel group that includes mercenaries from Chad, Niger and Cameroon, seeks to impose strict shari’a law throughout Nigeria, and has ties to Al Qaeda. Ethnic Fulani herdsmen, some of them from outside of Nigeria, are carrying out their assaults in military camouflage and armed with sophisticated weapons.

It was reported in late November that a Christian lawyer helping to promote religious freedom in Sudan has fled the country after authorities threatened to kill him if he failed to report to them every day, the attorney said.

Security officials arrested him at his home in Khartoum in May and seized his documents, laptop and internet modem, interrogating him for eight hours.

As Western powers prepare to ease economic sanctions against Iran in support of a new nuclear non-proliferation treaty, human rights activists said in November that leverage for winning freedom for prisoners of faith may about to be lost.

A human rights advocate and researcher said his colleagues in different human rights groups were concerned when they found out that there was no talk of human rights during negotiations with Iran, specifically about the release of prisoners of faith. In the quest to obtain some sort of agreement this month with the Iranians, they said, the pursuit of basic rights for Christians and other religious minorities was set aside.

An Israeli immigration judge has ordered the deportation of a Messianic Jewish man who was arrested on November 20 for taking part in an evangelistic event in southern Israel.

Barry Barnett, 50, a worker with Jews for Jesus UK, was ordered to leave the country by December 3. Barnett, who is based in England, was volunteering at the Jews for Jesus ‘Behold your God Israel’ campaign around the city of Be’er Shiva when he was arrested.

Gunmen who said they intended to kill a Christian in Somalia for spreading his faith, shot him to death on October 20.

Two men armed with pistols shot Abdikhani Hassan seven times as he approached his home after closing his pharmacy. Before killing Hassan, one of the assailants told his neighbour: ‘We have information that Hassan is spreading wrong religion to our people, and we are looking for him’.

A young woman in Tehran, Iran, who introduced her boyfriend to Jesus hasn’t seen him since he fled the city, but his dreams give her hope that he is well, it was reported in mid-November.

The Iranian woman has heard that since Armin Davoodi fled authorities who threatened him with death for proclaiming Christ earlier this year, he has been having the same recurring dream he had before he put his faith in Christ and stopped his drug addiction and suicide attempts. She was the one who, two years ago, first explained to him that the shepherd in his dream pointing toward the light was Christ.

Police and a banned Islamic extremist group in Lahore are searching for a young Christian accused of blasphemy — with the extremist group calling for his death — after he sought to correct misconceptions about Christianity in a Muslim book, it was reported in late October.

Sources close to Adnan Masih, 26, said he believes that if he turns himself in he will be killed by either the Islamic extremist Jamaat ud Dawa (JuD) or the Pakistani judicial system, which makes blasphemy against Islam’s prophet punishable by death. They said Masih denies having written anything against Islam or its prophet, when he scribbled in a Muslim book he found in a glass-works shop where his brother works.

In November, traditionalist Catholics abducted, jailed and beat a group of evangelical Christians with rods and stones in Oaxaca on orders from the head of a municipality, according to human rights officials.

A mob sent by San Juan Ozolotepec President Pedro Cruz Gonzalez on November 4 attacked the Christians for declining to participate in and help pay for traditionalist Catholic festivals and for protesting their previous mistreatment. The mob attacked the Christian’s unfinished church structure with sledgehammers and pick-axes, and four of the Christians were jailed from November 5-8, according to the National Commission on Human Rights (NCHR).

Protestant church leaders in Bolivia are trying to revoke a new law that they say aims to ‘impose contrary beliefs’ and ‘denies us the right to be a church’.

Asserting that Law 351 is unconstitutional, the National Association of Evangelicals of Bolivia (ANDEB) filed suit at the end of August before the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, demanding that it be revoked. Christian leaders argue that its re-registration requirements restrict the ‘rights and religious freedoms of churches’.