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A Christian think-tank has revealed that it believes that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world.

According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC), 900,000 Christians have been “martyred” in the past ten years.

The CSGC says that, from its research, it can deduce that 90,000 Christians a year for the past decade, and one every six minutes, has been “martyred”.

The research by the Christian think-tank goes against research by the US government National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), which suggests that 97 percent of deaths relating to terrorism are Muslim.

According to CSGC spokesman Gina Zurlo, “Christians are a third of the world’s population; there are 2.4bn Christians in the world and two thirds of those Christians live in areas of war and of conflict and of violence, so I think it’s important to remember that Christianity is not easy in other places of the world like it is in Europe and North America.”

According to the CSGC study, 30 percent of Christians died in acts of terrorism, and that 70 percent of those were killed in Africa amid tribal battles.

But OpenDoors charity, which aims to serve ‘persecuted Christians’, says that in 2015 in Nigeria, 4,028 out of 7,100 Christians were killed.

Attacks have been carried out by Boko Haram and al-Shabaab in West Africa and East Africa respectively, targeting Christians.

A spokesman for the Vatican, Greg Burke, added to Fox News: “There are actually more martyrs today than there were in the early days of Christianity and if you think about the early days here in Rome even, there were martyrs all over the place, so things were pretty bad then.”