World in Brief

A sloppy police investigation and pressure from an Islamist extremist party has led a Special Anti-Terrorism Court Judge, Sargodha Muhammad Abbas, to grant bail to at least 52 Muslims accused of killing a Christian man over a false blasphemy accusation.

The Muslims are suspected of lynching 74-year-old Nazeer Masih Gill in the Mujahid Colony area of Sargodha, Punjab Province. Gill succumbed to his injuries a week later. Attorney Asad Jamal said he regretted the suspects’ release but was expecting it because of the police’s ‘intentional’ poor investigation.

Spanish pastors, church leaders and representatives of regional evangelical councils met politicians and authorities at Spain’s annual Prayer Breakfast in Madrid.

Convened by the Federation of Evangelical Religious Entities of Spain (FEREDE), the event was an opportunity for evangelicals to pray for (and with) representatives of different parties and government authorities. The event was chaired by Carolina Bueno of FEREDE. She emphasised ‘doing what is good, blessing and praying for all the authorities, political leaders, representatives of public institutions and other organisations’.

Several young people handed the Pro-Life Youth Letter to representatives of the 35 countries attending the 54th General Assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS), held in Asunción, Paraguay. The Ibero-American Pro-Life Youth Letter reaffirms the fundamental rights of every individual, including the right to life from conception to natural death.

Many pro-life coalitions strongly denounced the OAS organisers before the meeting for forbidding three of them to attend, despite having already been accepted.

Around 450 Christians from different churches gathered at Bethlehem Chapel in Prague for the National Day of Prayer. It was historically significant, as it was where Jan Hus, a key pre-Reformation figure, preached in the beginning of the 15th century.

The purpose of the three-hour gathering was to engage in collective prayers for the country and to await the Holy Spirit. It featured worship led by Alžběta Barošová, with musicians from both Catholic and Protestant churches.

Local officials in Indonesia have stopped a wedding ceremony at a Pentecostal Church on Java Island and banned the church from holding further worship meetings.

Village head Eko Budi Santoso of Mergosari, Tarik District claimed the congregation lacked a building permit and said that local residents opposed their church. But local residents in the Muslim-majority country reportedly said they were not opposed to the church worshipping at the ‘House of Prayer’, a building that does not have the function and markings of a church.

A former church pastor, two of his daughters and three of his granddaughters have perished in a house fire in the village of Necedah, Wisconsin. The victims were 66-year-old Steven Witte, 38-year-old Charis Kuehl, 35-year-old Lydia Witte, and three children, aged eight, five, and two.

The Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church in Green Bay and Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod President Mark Schroeder said that Steven Witte served as a missionary in Thailand and as a pastor at Beautiful Savior Church from 2001 to 2009.

Pro-life protester Calvin Zastrow has been sentenced to six months in prison at Nashville, Tennessee, for blocking access to an abortion clinic. Zastrow was also given three years of supervised release and is expected to self-report to prison by 1 October. He received no fine.

Zastrow was one of 11 people indicted in 2022 for obstructing the entrance to the Carafem Health Center Clinic in Mount Juliet, a suburb of Nashville. The group gathered at the entrance, sang hymns, and encouraged women not to proceed with their abortions.

The Catholic Church is set to allocate 104 million Canadian dollars (£60million) to compensate hundreds of sexual abuse victims in eastern Canada.

Following a 2020 legal finding, the Archdiocese of Saint John was implicated in one of Canada’s worst child sex abuse scandals at the now-closed Mount Cashel Orphanage in Newfoundland and Labrador. The abuse, by priests and church officials, began in 1940 and persisted for decades. 292 victims have won individual compensation payments ranging from $55,000 (£31,500) to $850,000 (£486,285).

Samaritan’s Purse has airlifted 24 tonnes of emergency supplies to the Cayman Islands and other Caribbean regions devastated by Hurricane Beryl. The Category 3 hurricane, with winds reaching 120 mph, has already claimed ten lives.

The storm’s powerful winds and heavy rain ravaged Jamaica’s southern coast before reaching Grand Cayman and continuing its destructive path west-northwest. Samaritan’s Purse sent a DC-8 loaded with essential supplies, including tarpaulins, solar lights, water units and a mobile medical unit to aid victims.

Archaeologists from the University of Innsbruck have made a major discovery inside a marble shrine of an early church in Austria: a significant religious relic adorned with Christian motifs.

The 1,500-year-old ivory box illustrates Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai, as detailed in the book of Exodus. It also features imagery of saints and Christ’s ascension. The relic was found during excavations of a church on the Burgbichl in Irschen, southern Austria. They found the ivory box in a pit-like depression beneath a sealing stone, where an altar once stood.

In 2023 over 400,000 people chose formally to dissociate themselves from the Catholic Church in Germany.

The German Bishops’ Conference, which produced the statistics, said while these numbers are high, they reflect a slight decrease from the record 522,000 departures recorded the previous year. The overall membership of Germany’s Catholic Church stood at roughly 20.35 million by the end of 2023.

Hostility towards Christians is on the rise in Israel, with a surge in attacks on believers and church properties and a growing atmosphere of nationalism.

‘Attacks on Christians in Israel and East Jerusalem’, a report from the Jerusalem-based Rossing Centre for Education and Dialogue, said that Christian leaders have warned that there is an increasing feeling of insecurity among Christians in the Holy Land, reflecting a wider social and political trend. ‘While hostility towards the Christian presence has been a longstanding occurrence in some local communities, it has now escalated to a broader and more severe phenomenon,’ it said.

Suspected Fulani herdsmen killed eight Christians and wounded four others in attacks on three villages last week in Hwrra village, Plateau state.

The assailants killed five Christians, including two children, as they slept, wounded another and set three homes ablaze, said Sam Jugo, spokesman of the Irigwe Development Association of the predominantly Christian Irigwe ethnic group in Bassa County. Fulani herdsmen were also suspected of ambushing three Christians in Nkiedonwro village, killing one of them; the other two escaped with bullet wounds.

Iain Taylor