Uzbek Police Raid Christians’ Homes
ICC Note:
“We will continue fining you unless you stop storing religious literature in your home.” That’s what believers in Uzbekistan were told when police raided their home and took their Bibles and then fined them 50 times the monthly wage.
By Joseph DeCaro
10/20/2014 Uzbekistan (Worthy News)-A Christian in Uzbekistan has been fined and threatened with further punishment after religious literature was seized from his home during a raid by Uzbek police in August, according to Barnabas Aid.
Artur Alpayev was fined 50 times Uzbekistan’s minimum monthly wage for storing religious literature at his home in Navoi.
During sentencing, Judge Oltinbek Mansurov said: “We will continue fining you unless you stop storing religious literature in your home.”
The judge said that the literature should have been stored in a building belonging to a registered religious organization, but Alpayev is a member of a Christian denomination that refuses on principle to seek state registration.
That same month police also raided Maksim and Tatyana Kostin’s home in Tashkent; Christian books and materials were seized, including childrens’ Bibles. The Kostin’s were singled-out despite being members of an officially registered religious denomination.
The raid on the Kostin’s followed an earlier search at the home of Aleksei and Diana Meshkov in Samarkand; among the items confiscated were 21 Christian books — including two Bibles in Braille — and 132 biblical broadsides.
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