ZHASKENT, Kazakhstan — Within 48 hours of a claim by Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev that “religious freedom is fully secured,” seven members of a small Pentecostal Church — four of them in their 60s — were given heavy fines for meeting for Easter worship. The leader, Aleksandr Balaev, said he was fined the equivalent of six months of his pension. Galina Gileva, who is 73, complained that the police “brought me to such a position of stress that I suffered a heart attack.”
The raid on the church in Zhaskent was one of four recent raids on religious worship.
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