Some 100,000 Christians killed per year over faith

A staggering 100,000 Christians are killed annually because of their faith, according to the Vatican and several human rights groups claim such anti-Christian violence is on the rise in countries like Pakistan, Nigeria and Egypt.

"Credible research has reached the shocking conclusion that an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are violently killed because of some relation to their faith every year," Vatican spokesman Monsieur Silvano Maria Tomassi said Tuesday in a radio address to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

"Other Christians and other believers are subjected to forced displacement, to the destruction of their places of worship, to rape and to the abduction of their leaders, as it recently happened in the case of Bishops Yohanna Ibrahim and Boulos Yaziji, in Aleppo [Syria]," Tomassi said.

While several human rights groups could not comment specifically on the Vatican's number, organizations, like Persecution.Org, said the persecutions of Christians have been on the rise in places like Africa and the Middle East over the last decade.

"Two-hundred million Christians currently live under persecution. It’s absolutely on the rise," Jeff King, the group's president, told FoxNews.com.

"It’s easing in the old Communist world and it's rising in the Islamic world," King said, noting in particular countries like Egypt, Pakistan and Nigeria. King said that the first major killing spree in recent years happened between 1998 and 2003, when he claims 10,000 Christians were murdered in Indonesia alone during those years.

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