A Christian pastor has been sentenced to prison for two years for violating Indonesia’s law against blasphemy and hate speech in a case that has drawn scrutiny over the speed of his arrest and trial.
Two church leaders abducted in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains have been released, local sources said.
Following attacks on clergy in Sudan’s South Kordofan state last month, another church leader in Heiban town was abducted last week, according to sources.
Following Algeria’s closure of nearly all evangelical churches in waves of repression that began in 2017, Christians have been forced underground in what they describe as an internal exile, sources said.
Members of a break-away group from the rebel Sudan’s People Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N) abducted a pastor and others in North Kordofan state, Sudan on July 23, his brother said.
A rebel militant faction backed by Islamic extremist groups in Sudan on Friday (July 24) killed a pastor in South Kordofan state’s Nuba Mountains, area church sources said.
An imam who debated a pastor at an interfaith dialogue in Uganda is a suspect in the killing of the church leader after the event on Saturday (July 18), sources said.
Muslims in Indonesia on July 7 protested construction of a church building in South Sulawesi Province, falsely claiming it had not fulfilled legal requirements, sources said.
Muslim relatives of a father of five in Somaliland who recently became a Christian poisoned him to death this month for converting, sources said.
Six pastors and another Christian in India have begun serving their five-year prison sentences under an “anti-conversion” law, two years after they were falsely accused at a child’s birthday party, sources said.
Islamists in June demonstrated against the presence of a church in one city in West Java Province, Indonesia and prevented a funeral Mass in another, local sources reported.
The wife of a pastor falsely named in a criminal case in India this week sought the arrest of a Sikh man suspected of setting their church building and residence ablaze on June 14, sources said.
