Church in Linz Receives Threats and Personal Harassment after Media Coverage about alleged COVID-19 Outbreak in "Free Churches"

Case information
Incident date
Country
Austria
Place
Linz
Categories
  • Social Hostility / Intolerance
Attack Against
  • Faith
Perpetrator / Motive Indicators
  • Private
Hate Crime & Violent Incidents
  • Threats
Religious Freedom / Discrimination
  • Other (text field)
  • Defamation
Place of Incident
  • Church
Bias Indicators
  • Comments/Written Statements/Gestures/Graffiti
Reported to Police
  • Unknown
Response of Local Authorities
  • Unknown
Symbolic image; not a photograph of the reported incident.Image credit: Anastasiia Chepinska on Unsplash

A birthday party amongst members of the Romanian free church "Pfingstgemeinde Himmelstor" was reported to be the source of a COVID-19 outbreak cluster consisting of 234 infected people. The free church Christ Apostolic Church International (CACI) rented their church building in Linz to the Romanian church and after the media reported about the incident and disclosed the address of the venue, CACI received public harassment on the streets and threatening emails. In contrast to the other free church community, CACI did not have any cases of COVID-19 and followed the official government guidelines, as it is member of the officially state recognised society of free churches in Austria, whose other members did not report any positive COVID-19 cases either.

Sources