TIZI-OUZOU, Algeria (Morning Star News) – After Christians fended off an attempt to close a church building in Algeria on Aug. 26, gendarmes arrived early Monday morning (Sept. 2) and sealed it shut, sources said. Church leaders and their attorney had asserted that the order from the head of Bejaia Province to close the church in Ighzer […]

JOS, Nigeria (Morning Star News) – A Baptist pastor kidnapped and tortured last month in Nigeria was released over the weekend after his family and Christian leaders paid a ransom, sources said. Muslim Fulani herdsmen in Kaduna state who abducted Elisha Noma on Aug. 14 received 3 million naira (US$8,181) before freeing him on Saturday […]

(Morning Star News) – The 8-year-old boy didn’t realize that telling his Muslim relatives how much he enjoyed a church choir would cause them to attack his family. The seventh and youngest child of 54-year-old Lezia Nakayiza, widowed since September 2018, he didn’t know that his family was keeping their faith secret in Kasenge village, […]

TIZI-OUZOU, Algeria (Morning Star News) – A brigade of gendarmerie showed up at an evangelical worship site in Algeria on Monday (Aug. 26) to execute the latest of several church closure orders from provincial authorities, but Christian leaders thwarted the attempt. When Akbou gendarmerie parked their vehicles at 9:30 a.m. at the church courtyard in […]

JOS, Nigeria (Morning Star News) – Muslim Fulani herdsmen killed a Pentecostal pastor and abducted a Baptist pastor in a spate of kidnappings this month in Kaduna state, Nigeria, sources said. “The herdsmen, about 20 of them, shot into our house and broke the doors of the house,” said Emmanuel Noma, who along with his father, 60-year-old […]

(Morning Star News) – Miguel Pérez Díaz, his eight children and 87-year-old father have been living in a mountainside shack since May, when local officials expelled them from their village in Chiapas state, Mexico. Relatives, friends and neighbors in Tajlovijho, a village in the municipality of San Andrés Larráinzar in southern Mexico, had been harassing […]

TIZI-OUZOU, Algeria (Morning Star News) – Interrupting a worship service, police on Tuesday (Aug. 6) 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 told Morning Star News. “This is […]

NEW DELHI (Morning Star News) – An attorney representing Christians threatened at a wedding in northern India – with police joining in the verbal abuse and then arresting the Christians – couldn’t believe what was now happening to him. Attorney Harjinder Singh had gone to the workplace of the Sikh leader who organized the disruption […]

HYDERABAD, India (Morning Star News) – Persecution of Christians in Bihar state, India, has so intensified in the past two years that Pastor Shelton Viswanathan didn’t dare call police after Hindu extremists broke bones in his hand and foot. “If I force the police to register cases against the assailants, the [Hindu extremist] Bajrang Dal’s […]

(Morning Star News) – Authorities in China have added “illegal business activities” to the subversion charge against pastor Wang Yi and have coerced congregation members to falsely accuse him, according to advocacy and media reports. Pastor Wang, of Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC) in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, was detained in a Dec. 9 raid along with […]