God's Call Led to Torture and Death

January 14, 2008

Last month David Brash, a 62-year-old Baptist minister from Cheshire, England, believing that his life was being steered by the hand of God, left his homeland and family to move to the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines. He wanted to be with his new bride, Annalyn Batalyer, a pretty Filipina woman nearly 40 years younger than him that he had met at church a few years earlier when she was only 19. Having married her on Oct. 7, 2007, in a church wedding near her family’s home, Brash clearly had wanted to start a new life. His charred remains, however, were discovered in a swamp near the village of Barangay Tagapira, an area active with terrorists and extremists that England’s Foreign Office, as well as the U.S. Department of State, discourages its citizens from visiting. His hands and feet had been bound with steel chains, he had been severely beaten and shot, and his body had been set afire. Evidence showed that he had been tortured...

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