China yesterday confirmed that two people were arrested for building an illegal church that was demolished in Hangzhou on Saturday, after a rights group said hundreds of police had clashed with up to 3,000 Christians.
The arrests were made after the Christians refused to move from land that officials said they had illegally occupied in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan District, the official Xinhua news agency quoted local government official Qiu Youlai as saying.
Illegal building
"The district government carried out the demolition and arrested two people involved with the illegal construction according to law," Qiu said.
"Before demolishing the building, the government had negotiated with the Christians and offered a plot of land nearby for their use," he said.
The site was earmarked for a commercial center, but the church was erected in just 12 days and completed on Saturday, the day it was demolished, Qiu said.
The agency did not mention any clashes between police and supporters of the church, but local officials on Monday confirmed that police and supporters of the church had clashed.
`Not serious'
The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy on Monday said about 500 police officers clashed with 3,000 Christians outside the church, but a Hangzhou city police official said the incident was "not as serious as you have heard."
The center quoted sources as saying 20 Christians were injured, four of them seriously.
China officially has about 16 million Christians, but activists claim the true figure is closer to 40 million. Hangzhou's Xiaoshan District has about 80,000 Christians, the agency said.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000