received prison sentences and were forced to pay for their detention, BosNewsLife monitored Saturday, August 30.
The Forum 18 News Service (F18News) said a local court sent E. Kim, S. Stanislavsky, A. Tyan, N. Zuldikarov and O. Solijonov to prison for ten days while forcing them to pay 816 Sums (about eight U.S. Dollars) for each day of detention in temporary cells in Namangan.
They and three Baptist women were arrested August 15 during a service in a home in the village of Khalkabad in Namangan region, part of an Uzbekistan controlled area in the Fergana valley, said F18News which monitors religious persecution.
Judge Bahtierjon Batyrov of the regional criminal court was quoted as saying the fine and jail term were handed out "strictly in accordance with the law," and article 240 of the Criminal Code, which punishes "breaking the law on religious organizations."
MESSAGE
Although in most cases Christians receive only fines, Batyrov suggested he handed out a prison term to send a message to other believers amid reports of growing "unregistered" Christian activity in the region.
"It is true that the courts generally hand down more lenient sentences to such offenders. But in our (Pap) district the number of such cases has increased lately and for this reason I decided to sentence the offenders to a harsher punishment," he told F18News.
Despite the pressure there were no indications the Baptists of the Khalkabad congregation would back down. Their church belongs to the Council of Churches (or unregistered Baptists), which split from the All-Union Council of Baptists in 1961 when further state-sponsored controls were introduced by the then Baptist leadership.
ISLAM
The church has refused state registration ever since, believing that such registration leads to unwarranted state interference. According to one of its pastors in Moscow, it has 3,705 congregations throughout the former Soviet Union, F18News said.
Uzbekistan, a predominantly Islamic republic of roughly 24 million people, is one of five republics in Central Asia which were once part of the Soviet Union.
Human rights workers have observed an increase of persecution of especially Evangelical Christians of different denominations throughout the region, despite the collapse of Communism and Atheistic systems.
