Religious Violence In The News

ALGERIA

Two doctors were gunned down while changing a flat tire in one of the latest attacks on professionals. Extremist Islamic rebels have been blamed for scores of murders of doctors, professors, journalists, and intellectuals in a four-year battle to topple the secular government.
A newspaper editor killed by unidentified gunmen on Feb. 10 in Blida, about 30 miles from Algiers, was the 58th death since Islamic militants began targeting journalists in 1993.
Bloodshed in the insurgency-racked North African nation continued when 2 car bombs killed 17 people and wounded 93 others on Feb. 11.

A bomb exploded Feb. 9 in an underground parking lot in east Londong, wounding at least 34 people. It was the first bombing since the IRA suspended its 24-year campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland in September 1994. The peace process stalled when Britain and Protestant parties demanded the IRA, a Catholic organization, hand over its weapons before beginning negotiations.

The local head of the international men's Christian group Promise Keepers was sentenced to two years in prison for vicious sexual assault. Rick White, a Terrace church leader, pleaded guilty in B.C. Supreme Court to breaking into his former girlfriend's home last June armed with a knife and handcuffs, and sexually assaulting her. Source: Vancouver Province 2/4/96
An Ontario woman was sentenced to two years in prison for killing her granddaughter in an apparent exorcism. Ana Maria Canhoto, 43, pleaded guilty last June to manslaughter of Kira Canhoto, 2, who died of suffocation after being force-fed water "to ward off evil spirits." Source: Vancouver Province 1/11/96

Six Muslim militants were sentenced to death on Jan. 13 by an Egyptian military court for plotting to overthrow the government and install a strict Islamic state. Six other militants were acquitted and 12 were sentenced to perform hard labor in jail.

Five people were bludgeoned to death by residents of a fishing village, accused of being sorcerers responsible for several recent deaths. Execution of alleged witches and wizards is accepted in Haiti. Source: The Patriot-News 1/24/96

Muslim rebels killed 15 Hindu men during a raid on a Northern India village. About 20 armed men roused the isolated village on the night of Jan. 5, ordered Muslims to stand aside, and killed the remaining men. For six years, Muslim guerrillas have been waging a war of independence from predominantly Hindu India.
Rebel leader Sajaad Keenu was shot and killed on Jan. 8 by security forces in Srinagar. The chief of the Jammu-Kashmir Islamic Front was suspected of two bomb attacks that killed seven people and injured at least 60 others in New Delhi. Since the insurgency began in 1989, more than 13,000 people have been killed in fighting.

The director of a magazine critical of government policy was sentenced to six months in prison and 35 lashes for allegedly printing "fabrications" about Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Gardoon director Abbas Maroufi was also banned from practicing journalism for two years.

Hamas, an Islamic group, claims responsibility for four suicide bomb attacks killing 57 civilians and wounding 200 people from Feb. 25-March 4, sabotaging the peace process.
A Druse Arab woman was knifed by her brother as onlookers cheered when she returned to the village in mid-December that she left 22 years ago. The woman's mother said the "honor killing" was justified because her daughter had blackened the family's name when she divorced her Druse husband and ran away to remarry outside the faith. Nearly all of the 107 women killed as suspected Israeli informers during the six-year Palestinian uprising are believed to be the victims of honor killings.

At least 18 Muslim worshippers were killed and 20 others injured on January 26 when Indian rockets hit a mosque in Forward Kahuta, a remote village on the contested border of Pakistan and India. Pakistan and India have gone to war twice in the past 50 years over the former princely state of Kashmir between them.
In a public execution, two men convicted of murder by an Islamic court in the district of Khost were blindfolded and shot Feb. 11 by the father of one murder victim and the uncle of the other in the city square.

A truck packed with explosives plowed into a bank in downtown Colombo leaving up to 80 people dead and wounding 1,400. The Jan. 31 terror bombing is assumed to be the work of the Black Tigers, a fanatical sect of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The 13-year civil war between the mostly Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the Hindu Tamil minority has claimed 40,000 lives.

A police officer and eight militants were killed in a Jan. 2 confrontation with an Islamic militant group in the village of Kambo Ashara after failing to forcibly win converts.

A Buddhist monk was charged with the murder and robbery of a British tourist. The woman's body was found in a ravine near a Buddhist temple, 70 miles west of Bangkok. A tourist police official said the monk is an amphetamine addict who joined the temple after serving two years in jail for rape. The monk confessed on Jan. 14 to killing the woman after robbing her of a camera and cash.

Two eighth-grade boys were arrested for placing a bomb in a classroom at their Pompano Beach, Florida Catholic school. Faulty wiring prevented the bomb from exploding. Source: Sun-Sentinel 2/27/96
An Iowa woman is charged with first-degree murder for stabbing her daughter in the chest five times in late February. The woman said the devil made her kill the child, 12.
A worshipper is accused of killing two nuns and injuring two others in a bloody rampage on Jan. 27 at a Catholic convent northeast of Portland, Maine. Police arrived to find the man striking one of the nine elderly nuns in the face with a Virgin Mary statue.
The father of identical triplets is on trial on charges of sexually assaulting his daughters since 1994. The Dallas, Texas triplets say their father put them on birth control pills when they turned 16 and repeatedly raped them. He reportedly told them he was acting on instructions from God. Source: The Advocate 1/26/96

Sources: Associated Press, unless otherwise indicated. Special thanks to James Haught, editor of the Charleston Gazette.