The decapitated body of a Christian man has been discovered in Kirkuk, northern Iraq, a few days after he was kidnapped.
Ashur
Yacob Issa, 29, was abducted late Friday night or early Saturday
morning and his mutilated body was discovered Monday morning.
His family had been asked for a ransom but was not able to pay the sum of more than £61,500 (€70,000) the kidnappers demanded.
Speaking
to Aid to the Church in Need, the charity for persecuted and other
suffering Christians, Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk condemned the
killing, and went on to pay tribute to the strength and faith of his
community despite the continuing threat of violence.
Archbishop
Sako said: “In all these years, I have never heard of a single Christian
converting to Islam, despite the many threats.”
He added that
Muslims regularly go to his church seeking to convert, but he added: “I
am not allowed to baptise them. There is no religious freedom!”
Speaking
to Catholic News Agency Zenit, Archbishop Sako also appealed “to those
who were capable of committing such an inhuman act” to remember Mr
Issa’s widow and the children they orphaned.
He said: “If there is no human justice, sooner or later, there will be divine justice.”
Chaldean
Catholic Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, who visited Britain in March
to launch Aid to the Church in Need’s report on Christian persecution,
told the charity: “The murder was meant to intimidate Christians so that
in the future they will more readily pay ransom demands.”
Archbishop
Warda suspected Islamist fundamentalists were behind the recent act of
violence and called on Muslim clerics to make clear to their faithful
that such murders are crimes against humanity.
He said: “It is unacceptable that in some mosques hatred towards other faiths is still preached.”
However
Syrian Catholic Archbishop Boutros Moshe of Mosul told ACN that he
thought the motive for the violence in the country was not primarily
religious.
He suggested that it was driven by criminal gangs
trying to make money, adding that some radical political movements were
willing to use criminals – “Some even say the criminals are paid by the
parties.”
A delegation from ACN is currently in Iraq evaluating the situation of the Church there.
Speaking with Iraqi Christians, they found that many of them question the value of interreligious dialogue with Muslims.
One
priest said “The Muslims speak to us constantly about a ‘peaceful
coexistence’, but then when something happens, violence does not seem to
be condemned by Muslim clerics.”
According to Archbishop Warda
since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 up to 573 Christians have been killed
in religiously and politically motivated attacks.
He also stated that 66 churches have been attacked or bombed as well as two convents, a monastery and a church-run orphanage.
Hundreds
of Christian families fled to the north at the end of 2010 after the
attack on Baghdad’s Syrian Catholic Cathedral on October 31 where 58
people were killed and more than 70 others injured.