BAGHDAD - 4 June 2007 - 500 words
Chaldean Catholic Priest and three deacons shot dead in Iraq
A Chaldean Catholic Priest Father Ragheed
Ganni, 35, and three deacons, were shot dead last night in northern
Iraq.
The murder took place right after Mass in front of the Holy Spirit
Church in the Nur District of Mosul, where Father Ragheed Ganni
was parish priest.
"They finished Mass ... and the four of them got into the
priest's car to drive away. After they had gone about 100m a car
cut them off. Four armed men got out and shot them dead,"
Brigadier-General Mohammed al-Wagaa, police chief in the divided
northern city of Mosul said to the Salem Voice Ministries (SVM)
News Service.
The Catholic news agency AsiaNews reported
that hours later the bodies were still lying in the street because
no one dared retrieve them. Given the situation tensions in the
area remain high.
Last month, the leaders of Iraq's Christian minority called on
the country's beleaguered government to protect their community
from attacks by al-Qaeda-inspired Muslim extremists.
In a joint statement, Patriarch Mar Dinka IV of the Assyrian Church
of the East and the Chaldaean Catholic Patriarch Emmanuel Delly
of Babylon said Baghdad's remaining Christians were facing persecution.
They blamed the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, an alliance of
Islamist insurgent groups that serves as an al-Qaeda front, for
much of the violence.
"Christians in a number of Iraqi regions, especially those
under the control of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, have
faced blackmail, kidnapping and displacement," the May 10
statement said.
Before the US-led invasion of March 2003, there were estimated
to be about 800,000 Christians in Iraq, about three per cent of
the otherwise largely Muslim population, living mainly in urban
centres such as Baghdad.
Although there were some attacks on churches in the immediate
aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Christians
were not especially targeted while rival Sunni and Shiite Muslim
factions went to war.
As a relatively wealthy community, however, many Christians fell
prey to kidnap and ransom gangs and many - probably more than
half - of them have fled the country or moved to the relative
safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Now there are reports that Salafist groups such as al-Qaeda, fundamentalists
who believe Islam can be renewed by returning to the values of
the era of the Prophet Mohammed, are targeting Christians on purely
sectarian grounds.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent
bipartisan government agency, last month voiced concern at the
deteriorating situation for freedom of religion and belief in
Iraq.
Christian communities now face the threat of eradication in their
historic homelands in Iraq under pervasive and severe violence
and discrimination at the hands of both government and non-government
actors, it warned.
Father Ragheed himself had been targeted several times in previous
attacks. The Church of the Holy Spirit has also been repeatedly
attacked and bombed in the last few years, the last time occurred
but a few months ago.
Source: SVM News
© Independent Catholic
News 2007
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