Clerical kidnappings, elections, and COVID dominate Catholic news in Americas
- Apr 13, 2021
With more than a week of fierce fighting including beheaded bodies in the streets, the battle for the northern Mozambique town of Palma has highlighted the southern Africa country’s insurgency and threats to its multibillion-dollar investments.
Every year on major Christian feast days, somewhere in the world, Christians will be killed for no reason other than that they chose to attend religious services.
Members of Indonesia’s anti-terrorism police squad on Wednesday shot and killed two suspected militants who they believe were connected to a deadly suicide attack at a Catholic cathedral in the southern Philippines, and arrested 18 others, officials said.
Dozens of militants aligned with the Islamic State group opened fire on a Philippine army detachment and burned a police patrol car in a southern town but withdrew after troops returned fire, officials said Friday.
A Paris criminal court sentenced a 29-year-old Algerian man Thursday to life in prison for killing a woman and trying to bomb a church near the French capital in a failed 2015 attack that investigators said was plotted by Islamic State group extremists in Syria.
Abu Sayyaf militants may have staged suicide bombings that killed 14 people to avenge the death of a Filipino leader of the Islamic State group in the southern Philippines following a clash with troops last month, the army chief said Tuesday.
A woman was jailed for life, with a minimum sentence of 14 years, on Friday for plotting to blow up London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, a nearby hotel and a subway train in a suicide attack.
Catholic clergy in Africa’s northern Sahel region have warned that Islamist insurgents could intensify attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic while police and troops are diverted to civil order duties.