Pakistan — Muslim landowners in Pakistan abducted a Christian laborer, shaved his head and facial hair, blackened his face and paraded him on the back of a donkey for allegedly stealing wood from their property, his brother said.

On the assumption that impoverished Catholics in Muslim-majority Pakistan have little chance of obtaining legal defense, at least seven Muslims attacked Wasif George, 34, of village Chak 110-GB Chak Jhumra in Faisalabad District, Punjab Province, after he had gone to gather wood the evening of Feb. 27, said his brother, Patras George.

Wasif George has since plunged into depression, telling his family that he wanted to end his life, his brother said.

“If he had indeed committed any wrong act, the landowners could have had him arrested and charged under the law,” Patras George told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News. “But they instead used this as an opportunity to spread fear in the village.”

Wasif George had just returned home from work as a day laborer when his mother asked him to get some wood to prepare dinner, his brother said. Among those who attacked him were Junaid Javed, Tetar Ul Haq, Jahanzeb Javed and Naeem Saleem, said Patras George, adding that his brother wasn’t stealing wood but only gathering dead branches fallen from trees on the assailants’ property.

“My brother was gathering wood along the banks of a canal when the assailants came there and accused him of theft,” he said. “They dragged Wasif to a poultry farm owned by Junaid Javed where they not only tortured [by beating] him but also got his head and facial hair shaved by a barber, Razzaq.”

The assailants blackened his face, forced him to sit on a donkey and paraded him around in the village, he said.

“The entire village lined up on the streets and witnessed the inhumane treatment meted out to my brother,” he said. “No one had the courage to stop his persecutors as they brandished guns and threatened to shoot any person who dared to rescue the Christian.”

The assailants warned the villagers against recording videos of the abuse, and no one dared take out their phones, he said.

Patras George said that he had gone to bed early that evening as he wasn’t feeling well and had turned off the ringer of his phone when relatives arrived and asked his wife to wake him.

“I was shocked when I heard what was happening to my brother,” he said. “I started running towards the village center, making frantic calls for help to the police helpline from my phone in the meantime.”

When he arrived, he found his brother surrounded by villagers, and the assailants had fled.

“I cannot describe the pain of seeing my younger brother in that condition,” Patras George said, sobbing. “He just stood there, his head hung low, his eyes glazed with the pain of a soul shattered by the weight of humiliation.”

He said Wasif George’s wife and other family members remain at his side continually, fearing he might harm himself.

“Wasif has turned suicidal after this public humiliation as the weight of public shame has broken the man inside him,” he said.

Patras George said that a police team eventually arrived.

“After learning what had happened, they went to the homes of the perpetrators but took only the barber and a brother of the owner of the poultry farm into custody,” he said. “None of the main accused were arrested despite our pleas.”

The accused are influential landowners with criminal history and have friendly relations with local police, he said.

“Though police have registered a First Information Report [FIR], the accused have obtained pre-arrest bails and are now pressuring us to reconcile with them,” he said. “The police’s bias is evident from the fact that it has been a week since the case was registered, but we haven’t once been called to the police station to record our statements.”

About 25 to 30 Christian families reside in the village, all laborers of status too low to take a stand against powerful Muslim landlords, he said, asserting that their Christian faith was also a reason for denying them justice.

“None of our Christian religious or political leaders have shown any concern toward our plight,” Patras George said. “They are just busy running after money and titles and have no interest in fighting for our rights and justice.”

Pakistan Masiha Millat Party Chairman Aslam Sahotra told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News that they were standing by the George family and would continue to make efforts to bring justice.

“The humiliation Wasif has suffered is more than just the public shaming — it is the destruction of his Christian identity and the tearing down of his sense of self,” Sahotra said.

He said he regretted the silence of the villagers regarding the attack, saying their fear had emboldened the assailants to target any person with impunity.

“The police’s inaction also amplifies the hurdles to justice for the vulnerable and marginalized people in Pakistan,” he said. “The Punjab chief minister and senior police officials must take notice of this barbaric act and support the victim’s family in their pursuit for justice and due punishment to the perpetrators of this heinous crime.”

Pakistan is ranked No. 8 on Open Doors’ 2025 World Watch List of countries where it’s most difficult to live as a Christian.
Sources:Christian Post

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Iran— Iranian authorities rearrested two Christian men, Nasser Navard Gol-Tapeh in Parand and Joseph Shahbazian in Tehran, at their respective homes on Feb. 6, and transferred them to Evin Prison.

Charges haven’t been formally announced and the reason for the arrests remains unknown.

Both men, who are in their 60s, were previously imprisoned for their involvement in Christian house churches but had been released.

Gol-Tapeh received a 10-year prison sentence in 2017 for “acting against national security through the formation and establishment of illegal house churches,” but received a pardon in 2022. That same year, Shahbazian was sentenced to two years in prison, down from 10, for being involved in a Christian house church, and was pardoned in 2023 after serving a little over a year in jail.

According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI), Christians in the nation aren’t safe from persecution, even inside their homes.

“Christians in Iran are prohibited from building new places of worship and are often forced to gather in their homes, known as ‘house churches,’ the ICHRI stated. “However, even in the privacy of their residences, they remain targeted by authorities.”

Iran is an Islamic Republic where rules and legislation must adhere to Islamic principles. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) stated in a 2024 report that “in 2023, religious freedom conditions in Iran remained extremely poor.” The report also found that “between June and July [2023], security forces arrested at least 69 Christians across 11 cities.”

Continued, egregious persecution and targeting of Christians for their faith remains ongoing in Iran. Christ followers are harassed and face the fear of imprisonment for following their faith. As of 2023, the nation was listed on the U.S. Department of State’s Countries of Particular Concern list for severe religious freedom violations.
Sources:persecution

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Kenya – In Kenya, hundreds of thousands are crammed into Africa’s largest slum. Known as Kibera, it’s a world where hope is often in short supply. In this darkness, however, a miracle is unfolding as a Texas-based ministry goes door-to-door, bringing God’s love and life-changing water filters.

Infamous for its gritty reputation, where crime and violence lurk at nearly every corner, Kibera faces extreme poverty and gang violence, while lacking basic necessities like clean water and sanitation, earning its reputation as one of the “darkest, filthiest, and most hopeless places in the world.”

Kibera is Africa’s largest slum, and a typical house here measures only eight by eight feet, and it’s built with mud walls, a corrugated tin roof, and either a dirt or concrete floor. There’s not a bathroom in the home. There’s no kitchen area in the home. It’s basically for sitting and sleeping only.

Chris Beth, founder of The Bucket Ministry, first stepped into Kibera in 2017. What he saw shook him to his core.

“There wasn’t one home that had access to clean, safe drinking water,” he told  on a recent trip to Kibera.

Water here isn’t a blessing — it’s a curse.

It’s a common scene here for folks to line up with jerry cans just to get water. The original source of this water is typically clean and safe to drink. But it must then travel through an intricate spiderweb-like system of pipes. The problem is that many of those pipes are broken, and contaminated water ends up getting into those pipes.

The Bucket Ministry has shown through their research that once the water gets to a certain point, the water is still very contaminated.

“So what you see is these snaked water lines all over this place that are on the surface, and most of them are illegally connected, they’re scabbed on to each other, and all of them leak,” Beth described while standing near one of those pipes carrying water. “Those leaks will actually start to suck sewage water into the pipes and contaminate the entire system with E coli, maybe dysentery, typhoid, cholera.”

Endless piles of trash are scattered throughout Kibera. The absence of proper sewage leaves human waste on the streets, which then ends up in the water.

The official statistics say there are 78 latrines in all Kibera serving over 400,000 people.

Beth recognized the urgent need for clean water and sent a team of 60 to canvass the slum.

“And all they did for four months was knock on every single one of the doors in this place and we found out that there were 81,077 homes,” said Beth. “We found out that there’s about 408,000 people created in God’s image that are sequestered to live in this place.”

In 2000, The Bucket Ministry began a groundbreaking effort—distributing life-saving water filters to each home here.

George Owegi, a local elder here, was initially skeptical.

“Many NGOs, many people have come, and they have never made any impact, so when I saw them I thought they are just the same like other people,” Owegi told CBN News.

But this effort changed minds as Beth partnered with the Sawyer filter company to distribute plastic buckets, each equipped with a filtration system that makes contaminated water drinkable.

“There’s these straws, these membranes and the contaminants, the dirty water getting caught on the outside of these membranes,” described Beth. “And then the clean water comes through the inside of the membrane.”

One hundred local missionaries, mostly Kibera residents, joined in by installing filters and teaching residents how to maintain them.

Missionary leader Phoebe Wafula says the impact was clear after only about 70 days of using the filters.

“As we are speaking today, there is a lot of changes, especially through clean, safe drinking water. A lot of diseases have been eradicated,” said Wafula.

The Bucket Ministry used mapping software to track every filter.

“At the point of distribution, we scan the barcode and deliver the filter to the recipient family,” The Bucket Ministry’s Mission Mapping software describes in a video. “We then collect baseline data on the family’s physical health and spiritual orientation to chart their progress.”

“And then every follow-up visitation, we scan the barcode again and we collect new data,” added Beth.

The result is visualized in the Mission Mapping software.

“What you are seeing right now is a time progression map with the blue dots being actual locations of filters distributed in the Kibera by the Bucket Ministry teams,” he showed us.

Beth’s team distributed 81,777 filters, providing clean water to all 408,478 residents of the slum.

The project reached completion in December as Michael Wanjohi became the last filter recipient. “It’s a miracle to me. For me it’s a 100 percent miracle,” exclaimed an excited Wanjohi.

And the transformation doesn’t stop there.

“Water is the secondary reason why we are there,” declared Beth. “The gospel is the sole reason.”

Missionaries visited every single home here, sharing the gospel.

“Next: you will see white dots populating,” the narrator in the Mission Mapping software describes. “These white dots represent where our local missionary teams have witnessed professions of faith by the families that have received the life-saving water filters and heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. Again, these are precise GPS positions and dates of the interaction.”

Local pastor and 44-year resident Raphael Dihanda tells CBN News no NGO has ever shared the gospel so widely in Kibera.

“When The Bucket Ministry came in, and they recruited the missionaries, going and supplying the filters and the buckets, people started accepting the gospel,” said Dihanda, who pastors Grace Revival Church in Kibera. “And we can see now the great harvest is coming in the Kingdom of God.”

More than 22,000 people gave their lives to Christ and the miracles keep going.

“Lastly, you will see yellow dots populating on the top of the blue and white dots,” he says, describing the mapping software. “These represent the actual locations and dates of when our teams have taught ongoing discipleship lessons in the homes of filter recipients.”

The team shared over half a million discipleship lessons.

“Nobody has ever done this. Nobody has ever done this,” Dihanda told. “Thinking of visiting someone’s house once, twice, thrice. It has never been done.”

Owegi says the spiritual effects rippled across the slum, transforming lives in ways no one expected.

“People are testifying, people are leaving crime, they are changing their ways and they have reformed,” said Owegi.

Prostitution, which had been a survival mechanism for so many women in Kibera, also began to fade.

“People didn’t know Christ but what we have done and the work that has been done in Kibera, through God, is really tremendous,” declared Wafula.

More than 1,500 people were baptized, including Samuel Mwang.

“I was a very bad person before today, I was untrustworthy, I was a thief, a drug addict, but God healed me,” Mwang told after emerging from the baptismal pool. “Missionaries visited my home and told me about Jesus Christ, and I accepted Him into my life.

With work in Kibera complete, Beth’s team is now taking the mission to another nearby slum. The Bucket Ministry is now targeting the community on the outskirts of Nairobi known as Kawangware as their next project.

According to their initial assessment, there are about 153,000 homes.

Work began January 1st with 3,429 water filters already distributed and 1,075 people giving their lives to Jesus Christ, so far.

Beth aims to reach all 710,000 residents here with the gospel’s living water within the next four years.
Sources:CBN News

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