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Forum 18 News Service <http://www.forum18.org> Complaining that it was "too dangerous" to continue to meet, the Resurrection Full Gospel Pentecostal Church in the Fergana Valley town of Andijan -long denied state registration -has decided to close down. "We have faced such pressure from the leaders of the local mahallas [urban districts] and from the prosecutor, especially this year," the church's pastor Bakhtier Tuichiev told Forum 18 News Service. "It is too painful to talk about all the threats and insults we have had to endure." Fined last December, Tuichiev says he is now constantly monitored by police and is among a growing number of active Protestants denied permission to leave Uzbekistan. Eight members of another Full Gospel congregation in Andijan have had their appeals against fines imposed in May turned down. Their pastor, Dmitry Shestakov, is serving a four-year labour camp sentence. A Pentecostal Full Gospel congregation in the town of Andijan [Andijon] in the Fergana [Farghona] Valley has decided to close down and halt all its activities in the wake of official pressure. "I and our church leadership decided to close the church two months ago -it was too dangerous to continue to meet," Bakhtier Tuichiev, pastor of the Resurrection Church, told Forum 18 News Service from Andijan on 19 June. "We have faced such pressure from the leaders of the local mahallas [urban districts] and from the prosecutor, especially this year. It is too painful to talk about all the threats and insults we have had to endure." Protestant congregations elsewhere in Uzbekistan are among religious minority communities facing a new wave of pressure (see F18News 26 June 2006 <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=980>). A growing number of active Protestants are on an exit blacklist and cannot leave their own country.