Reply #17: Who doesn't remember American missionaries caught in the Congo with lotsa guns? [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

Gun runners or missionaries
Americans with arsenal claim to be men of God
By Angus Shaw And Amy Forliti, Associated Press writers

http://archive.southcoasttoday.com.nyud.net:8090/daily/03-99/03-21-99/pic2.jpg

With fighting growing fierce in Congo's eight-month civil war, the three strapping Americans who call themselves Christian missionaries loaded their pickup and headed south for the border.
They parked the green and white GM Sierra at the airport in Harare, Zimbabwe, and lined up to board a flight to Switzerland en route home to Harvestfield Ministries, their tiny church in Indianapolis.
But a metal detector spotted a handgun in a coat pocket. Police swarmed. More guns turned up in their luggage.
Out in the pickup was a bigger surprise: a warren of secret compartments containing two semi-automatic assault rifles, 10 disassembled shotguns and sniper rifles, one machine gun, 19 handguns, 70 knives, silencers, telescopic sights, ammunition, camouflage paint and two-way radios.

Zimbabwe accuses the Americans of supplying guns to rebels trying to overthrow Congo President Laurent Kabila. The men, jailed since March 7 on charges of espionage, terrorism, sabotage and weapons violations, say they were merely delivering Bibles, medicine, clothing and seeds to poor Africans. They say the arsenal found in the truck was for self-defense on a troubled continent and recreation.

Men of God with a penchant for war games? Mercenaries posing as evangelists? Details emerging from a quiet Indianapolis neighborhood and a southern African capital present a contradictory story involving guns and faith.
Whatever the truth of the men's purpose in Africa, they face life in prison if convicted.

The suspects' families insist they were in Congo on a mission of mercy and Bible work for Harvestfield Ministries, a little-known fundamentalist church founded in Oregon, moved to Congo in 1997 and located to Indiana seven months ago.
Harvestfield is headed by an itinerant preacher, Jonathan Wallace, 43, who said he met the three men -- Joseph Wendell Pettijohn, 35, Gary George Blanchard, 34, and John Lamonte Dixon, 39 -- while on the road preaching. Pettijohn later married Wallace's daughter, LaDonna.

The congregation consists of the Wallaces, Blanchards and Pettijohns and their children, as well as Dixon, another man and that man's teen-age son -- a total of 14 people.
"We're not gun smuggling. We are not terrorists. We are missionaries who had a few guns," Wallace said in an interview Monday at his rented three-bedroom brick house in the northwest quarter of Indianapolis. The weapons, he insisted, were for hunting, target shooting, paintball war games and protection.
Zimbabwe police suggest otherwise. The arms included shotguns modified with hand grips and shortened stocks, typical of weapons used in military and paramilitary close-range attacks.

More:
http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/03-99/03-21-99/g03wn232.htm

Onward, Christian soldiers?