Originally published in Daily Times
Four foreigners have been arrested in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi on suspicion of being Christian missionaries and printing books about Christianity, a security official said on Saturday.
“They were arrested on Tuesday at a publishing house where they were printing thousands of books that called for conversion to Christianity,” security official Hussein Bin Hmeid said.
“Proselytising is forbidden in Libya. We are a 100 percent Muslim country and this kind of action affects our national security.”
Hmeid said the government-affiliated security apparatus called the Preventative Security, for which he is a spokesman, had arrested an Egyptian, a South African, a Korean and a Swede who was travelling on a US passport.
“We are still holding interrogations and will hand them over to the Libyan intelligence authorities in a couple of days,” Hmeid said, without giving further details.
The Preventative Security apparatus is a parallel security body created during the 2011 war that ousted Muammar Gaddafi and made up of several rebel brigades which fought in the conflict.
While I am deeply sympathetic and pray for their release, I feel that missionaries/evangelists shoul respect the laws of the land they are working in and find other ways of presenting Christ to them. Edgar G