On the day Baku's Protestant Greater Grace church was celebrating Easter, police in the city's central Sabail district tried to forcibly deport a church member, alleging that she had been conducting religious "propaganda". One of the church's pastors, Musfig Bayram, told Keston News Service from Baku that police took Nina Koptseva, a Russian citizen who has a residence permit to live in Baku, to the city's railway station on Sunday morning (31 March), bought her a ticket to the Russian border and tried to place her on the train without any court decision. It was only when she screamed loudly and insisted that if she had to leave she could buy an airline ticket to Russia herself that police halted the attempt and returned her to the cells in the Sabail district police station. Koptseva is now slated for deportation today (1 April) by air.

by Felix Corley, Keston News Service As believers who claim their rights have been violated by the state authorities debate and argue over the best way to resolve such violations, Keston News Service has discovered that Rafik Aliev, chairman of the State Committee for Relations with Religious Organisations, has repeatedly warned believers not to take ... Read more

Just two days after a court in the capital Baku liquidated a Baptist congregation, a local policeman in the small town of Chukhuryurd near Shemakha in central Azerbaijan tried to ban a small Baptist church from meeting, Baptist sources told Keston News Service. "He had heard the news of the Baku church's liquidation on ANS television and came to the local elder last Friday [5 April] and told him the church could not meet on Sunday for worship," Ilya Zenchenko, head of the Baptist Union in Azerbaijan, told Keston from Baku on 10 April. "We told the church elder on Saturday the policeman had been overzealous and exceeded his powers and that his demands for the church not to meet had no legal basis."