Bishkek Churches Suffer Rash of Violent Robberies

About 10 unknown armed people wearing masks attacked the office of the spiritual center of the Seventh Day Adventist Church located on Magadanskaya Street.

The unknown people tied up the hands and legs of a guard – 61-year-old Chupakova – with a scarf and took possession of a laptop and a metal safe containing 158,000 soms [about 3,400 dollars].

A wave of robberies has swept Protestant churches in Bishkek and Chui Region. It seems that there is only one single group involved because all the robberies are carried out according to the same scenario. Many pastors and parishioners are frightened: what if their house of worship will be next? Will an end be put to all this?

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All of the attacked religious organizations are Christian organizations of the Protestant denomination. Their activities are not banned in our country and the authorities do not see anything wrong about them. There is no way that the whole series of such attacks could have gone unnoticed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, however the law-enforcement agencies have not yet made any official statements on these incidents, nor have they said anything about this possibly being the work of one well-organized group of evildoers.

"We were really surprised that the law-enforcement agencies had reacted to this incident rather passively," Vasiliy Din, pastor of the robbed Baptist church in Orozbekov, said. "They did not take the prints of the burglars' shoes; they did not make the identikit of one of the attackers identified by the watchman. They even were not interested in the tread of the burglars' car. We later came to know that nobody had carried out any serious investigations into the robberies of the other looted churches either."