A Mesa man serving as a Christian missionary in Russia apparently was kidnapped last week, the third act of violence there against Phoenix-area religious missionaries this year.
Herb Gregg, 51, reportedly was forced into a car Wednesday in Dagestan, a region of Russia where he and his wife have been working for about four years, an official with The Evangelical Alliance Mission, or TEAM, said Sunday."We can confirm that he was indeed abducted," said John Jackson, a spokesman for TEAM, which is based in Wheaton, Ill.
Jackson said Gregg was returning home after coaching a youth basketball team in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, when a car pulled up and several men forced him into the vehicle.
"So far there has been no contact from anyone concerning Mr. Gregg," Jackson said in a statement. "The local authorities, as well as officials in Moscow and Washington, have been informed of this event."
Gregg and his wife, Linda, who have a home in Mesa, are career missionaries who have been living in Dagestan since 1994, where they teach English at a university.
The Greggs have a son and daughter living in the Phoenix area, but they did not want to comment on the incident.
An official of one of the Phoenix area churches that is sponsoring the Greggs' mission said the couple had been warned of possible danger recently.
"It's a volatile area, with a lot of corruption and ethnic turmoil," said the Rev. Gil Crowell, outreach pastor for Scottsdale Bible Church. "Things had been getting hot lately. A top religious leader in the region was assassinated a couple months ago."
The kidnapping was the third incident involving Phoenix-area missionaries in Russia this year. The other two involved missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In March, Travis Tuttle, 20, of Gilbert, and a fellow missionary for the LDS Church were kidnapped in Saratov, about 450 miles southeast of Moscow. They were released unharmed after four days.
Then, in October, Bradley Alan Borden, a 20-year-old LDS missionary from Mesa, was injured and a young Nevada man was killed in a stabbing in Russia.
Crowell said that the motive for Russian kidnappings generally is money. They can involve either quick-hit, unprofessional kidnappings or more elaborate schemes.
He said in a quick-hit kidnapping, the family of the victim usually is called within an hour with a demand for money, which did not occur in Gregg's case. The more elaborate kidnappers usually wait 10 days or longer to contact the family so they will be desperate to cooperate.