Utdrag ur Intercessors Network: SHORT NOTES-mailing # 598

SAUDI ARABIA: AUTHORITIES ARREST CHRISTIAN CONVERT
Blogger incarcerated after writing about conversion, criticizing Islamic judiciary.
 
Five months after the daughter of a member of Saudi Arabia’s religious police was killed for writing online about her faith in Christ, Saudi authorities have reportedly arrested a 28-year-old Christian man for describing his conversion and criticizing the kingdom’s judiciary on his Web site.
Saudi police arrested Hamoud Bin Saleh on Jan. 13 “because of his opinions and his testimony that he had converted from Islam to Christianity,” according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. Bin Saleh, who had been detained for nine months in 2004 and again for a month last November, was reportedly being held in Riyadh’s Eleisha prison.
 
On his web site, which Saudi authorities have blocked, Bin Saleh wrote that his journey to Christ began after witnessing the public beheading of three Pakistanis convicted of drug charges. After reading how Jesus forgave – rather than stoned – a woman condemned for adultery, Bin Saleh eventually received Christ as savior.
“Just look and ask for the light of God,” he wrote in Arabic in his Dec. 22 posting. “There might be no available books to help you make a comparative study between the teachings of Muhammad (which in my opinion are a series of political, social, economical and human disasters) and the teaching of Jesus in Saudi Arabia, but there are many resources on the Web by which you might get to the bosom/arms of the Father of salvation.”
 

SAUDI ARABIA: PASTOR FLEES DEATH THREATS
Religious police, others warn key figure in expatriate church to leave.
 
A prominent foreign pastor in Saudi Arabia has fled Riyadh after a member of the mutawwa’in, or religious police, and others threatened him three times in one week. Two of the incidents included threats to kill house church pastor Yemane Gebriel of Eritrea.
On Wednesday (Jan. 28), Gebriel escaped to an undisclosed city in Saudi Arabia. A father of eight who has lived and worked as a private driver in Saudi Arabia for 25 years, Gebriel told said that on Jan. 10 he found an unsigned note on his vehicle threatening to kill him if he did not leave the country.
 
On Jan. 13, he said, mutawwa’in member Abdul Aziz and others forced him from his van and told him to leave the country. “There was a note on my van saying, ‘If you do not leave the country, we will kill you,” Gebriel told Compass by telephone. “Three days after that, [Aziz] said, ‘You’re still working here, why don’t you go out of the country?” Two days later, Gebriel said, four masked men – apparently Saudis – in a small car cut off the van he was driving. “They said, ‘We will kill you if you don’t go away from this place – you must leave here or we will kill you,’” he said.
 

IRAN: THREE CHRISTIANS ARRESTED FROM HOMES IN TEHRAN
‘Continuously high’ wave of arrests increases; whereabouts, charges unknown.
 
Three Christians from two different families were arrested from their homes Wednesday morning (Jan. 21) and are being held without charges, sources told Compass. Authorities took Jamal Ghalishorani, 49, and his wife Nadereh Jamali from their home in Tehran between 7 and 8 a.m., about a half hour after arresting Hamik Khachikian, an Armenian Christian also living in Tehran.
Ghalishorani and his wife are Christian converts from Islam, considered “apostasy” in Iran and potentially punishable by death. The three arrested Christians belong to house churches, source said, and they hold jobs and are not supported as clergy. The arrests come as part of a tsunami of arrests in the past several months, sources said.
Arrests and pressure on Christians from authorities have ramped up even further in the past few months, the source said, adding that the reasons were unclear. Another source, however, said the arrests are part of a concerted, nationwide government plan against non-Islamic faiths. “We are quite sure that these arrests are part of a bigger operation from the government,” the source said. “Maybe up to 50 people were arrested. In Tehran alone already some 10 people were arrested – all on the same day, January 21.”
 

IRAN: TENSION BETWEEN FAITH AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOMS
 
The wave of the persecution of Christians may be intensifying in Iran. Arrest reports came in almost every month during 2008. Paul Estabrooks with Open Doors notes that the harassment isn’t following the “normal” pattern.
“The pressure against the church growth has cycled: there’s a period of pressure, then a period of relaxation. Most recently, three different Christians have been arrested from two different families, and we’re very concerned for them.”
 
Estabrooks says the recent change in the penal code is cause for great concern. Leaving Islam, which is considered apostasy, carries a deadly penalty. “It means that these men could actually be executed for having been converts from Islam to Christianity.”
It appears the arrests are part of a concerted, nationwide government plan. Estabrooks urges prayer for the believers in Iran. “As we’ve seen in church history, whenever the church has been under pressure, the church seems to deal with that pressure in unique ways, and in ways that actually helps it to grow.”


Källa: Intercessors Network
SHORT NOTES-mailing # 598