10 July 2001

A church in Uzbekistan was raided by eight plain-clothes police officers during a service on Sunday 24 June.

The congregation was split up into separate rooms, and ten adults and two children interrogated. Charges were made against nine of the adults, which were later dropped. Meanwhile Pastor Nikolai Shevchenko has been charged with leading an unregistered religious group and has been threatened with up to eight years in prison. Pastor Shevchenko says that he has applied to have the church properly registered many times in the past five years without success.

(Report provided by the Barnabas Fund; from the Keston News Service)