by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - Three East London churches were attacked last week, in a string of arsons that left pentagrams, “666” symbols, and the word “hell” scrawled in the doors.
St. John’s in Stratford, Cann Hall Road Baptist Church in Leystone, and St. Matthew’s in West Ham, one of which had a children’s class going on at the time of the attacks, had doors partially or totally destroyed in what investigators now suspect was the work of a single arsonist.
'[The fire] was bad enough but also our minister was working in the building and a childminding group was using the hall which the door enters into,” the daughter of the church secretary at Cann Hall Road Baptist church told parishioners, according to the Daily Mail.
The United Kingdom saw another slew of church attacks in March and October of last year, where, in one case, a sacred picture at the altar of a Catholic church in Great Yarmouth was replaced with a picture of the devil.
The Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe documented over 500 anti-Christian acts in Europe between 2016 and 2017, with France alone experiencing as many as 2,000 between 2017 and 2018, according to the French Ministry of the Interior.