This is the short edition of Morales, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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Hello and welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander.

This week are Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet.

Police in Pakistan say at least 75 people have been killed in a double suicide bombing at a church in Peshawar.

Three people, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed in the Egyptian capital Cairo when gunmen on motorcycles open fire on a wedding party outside a Coptic Christian church.

These two attacks hit the headlines within just a month of each other and thereby no means isolated incidents.

Earlier this year the Vatican spokesman Archbishop Salvano Mario Tomassi made a radio address to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Credible research has reached the shocking conclusion that every year an estimate of more than 100,000 Christians are killed because of some relation to their fate.

More than 100,000 Christians killed because of their faith every year.

This statistic has been repeated many times in news reports. On the internet it's taken on a life of its own, popping up all over the place, sometimes with an additional detail that these lives are taken by Muslims.

Listeners see Colin Gridge asked us to do some fat-checking, which Wesley Stevenson has been helping me with.

And the number comes from the sense of the study of global Christianity at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in the United States.

To get this figure of 100,000 they've estimated the number of Christians who've died as martyrs between the year 2000 and the year 2010, which is about a million by their reckoning.

And they've divided that number by 10 to get an annual number of 100,000, which they're still using today.

On model level this seems like a reasonable calculation. But when you dig into the figures you see that the majority of the million Christian martyrs they've counted,

died in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now Professor Thomas Schirmacher from the International Society for Human Rights has been interrogating these numbers.

The largest number comes from the Civil War and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they take about 20% of those people having died as martyrs.

And that means that 90% of the number 100,000 actually are people that died in Congo.

So when you hear that 100,000 Christians are dying for their faith, you need to keep in mind that the vast majority, about 90,000, are people who were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

So we can say right away that the internet rumors of Muslims being behind the killing of 100,000 Christian martyrs a year are nonsense.

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