Young Uzbek Christians and police persecutors
Barnabas Fund, 18 December 2018
Christian converts offered to pray for their persecutors who threatened them as they worshipped secretly in Uzbekistan.
18 people thought to be police officers in civilian clothes entered the church where they were holding a youth prayer meeting in secret on 1 December and tried to film them on a mobile phone.
But the police stopped filming when a female worshipper asked the other young people to pray for those in authority i.e. for those who had come to persecute them.
The officers, shouting threats, then tried to force the believers to make written statements incriminating others. When the group refused, they were taken to a police station where their identities were checked. They were released after about 40 minutes.