BosNewsLife

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT, READERS’ DISCRETION ADVISED

ISTANBUL, TURKEY (BosNewsLife) — There was increased concern Thursday, April 26, about the plight of active Christians in Turkey after investigators revealed that three evangelical believers were "satanically tortured" last week before being killed.

The influential American human rights group International Christian Concern (ICC) with website www.persecution.org told BosNewsLife that the circumstances surrounding the deaths of German Tilman Ekkehart Geske, 45, and Turkish Christians Necati Aydin, 35, and Ugur Yuksel ,32, at the Christian Zirve publishing house were even worse than thought.

ICC, based in Washington DC, said the troubles began on Easter Sunday when five of the alleged killers had been to a service that Pastor Necati arranged in the eastern town of Malatya, the capital of Malatya province.

The men were reportedly known to local believers as searching for the faith in Christ. The suspects, one of whom is the son of a mayor in the Province of Malatya, are part of a tarikat, or a group of “faithful believers” in Islam, ICC added.

Tarikat membership is "like a fraternity membership" and means that "no one can get into public office without membership" of such a group, ICC said. "On the day of the killing, the young Muslim men had arranged to meet the Christians at 10:00 am [local time] to ostensibly learn more about the Bible. They had gathered guns, bread knives, ropes and towels [as] they knew there would be a lot of blood, ready for their act of service to Allah," ICC stressed.

READING BIBLE

After Necati read a chapter from the Bible the assault reportedly began. "The young men tied Ugur, Necati, and Tilman’s hands and feet to chairs as they videoed their work on their cell phones," ICC said, adding that what "followed in the next three hours is beyond belief."…

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