The kidnapped Aleppo Bishops, Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim and Boulos Yazigi, were last seen three years ago this week. A multi-faith demonstration to remember them was held in Beirut, Lebanon 19 April, reports Fides.
There has been no news of the two men since their abduction on 22 April 2013, near the Turkish border, where they had been negotiating the release of two priests kidnapped two months earlier.
Ibrahim, head of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Aleppo, told the BBC a week before being abducted that there had been no targeting of Christians in Syria during the rebel uprising (which became the five-year-long civil war). He was the author in 2006 of ‘Accepting the Other,’ a book written in Arabic celebrating how different religions have co-existed for centuries through shared values, unlike the concept of forced multiculturalism emerging in the West.
No group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping. Contact by the head of the Lebanese General Security, General Abbas Ibrahim, was allegedly made with the kidnappers six months after the two Bishops were abducted but there have since been no further reported developments.