The Baptist World Alliance (BWA) General Secretary, Denton Lotz, has appealed to the Sri Lankan President, Mahindra Rajapakse to bring an immediate halt to the abuse and persecution faced by civilians on the country.

Appealing directly to the Sri Lankan leader, Lotz called for the government to do all within its power to stop the abductions and harassment being experienced by civilians.

Lotz issued his call after the abduction of four Christians on 2 March in the predominantly Buddhist country.

Victor Yogarajan, 51, a pastor from Vanuiya, was kidnapped on 8 March along with his two sons, and Joseph Suganthakumar, 20. Vanuiya is a front line northern town in the ongoing war between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), also known as the Tamil Tigers.

"It has become increasingly clear that this is not an isolated incident, but part of a trend of disappearances and abductions of civilians," Lotz claimed in his 13 March letter to the head of state of the South Asia island nation, located less than 20 miles off the southern coast of India.

"This is indeed a shocking trend for any nation, particularly for a democratic nation such as Sri Lanka with an elected government. In this situation the paramount responsibility to arrest this trend and bring to book anyone who engages in abductions or extra judicial killings falls on the Sri Lankan Government," Lotz said.

The four were abducted while en route to a bus stop in Negombo, a town on the Indian Ocean in the western region of Sri Lanka, approximately 20 miles north of the capital Colombo.

Sri Lanka has been dogged by a series of kidnappings. An Asian Human Rights Commission report indicates that a disappearance occurs in Sri Lanka every five hours, according to the BWA.

The Civil Monitoring Committee, based in Colombo, and formed in 2006 to monitor extra judicial killings, claims to have received almost 100 complaints of disappearances from Colombo and other areas since the committee's founding.

In light of this, Lotz called on President Rajapakse to take urgent "action to ensure all Sri Lankan citizens their basic security and freedom from fear of abductions, through adherence to proper legal procedures governed by the Rule of Law."

The country is 80 percent Buddhist. Just fewer than 1.5 million claim to be Christian in Sri Lanka, approximately seven percent of the population of more than 20 million in the former British colony, which gained independence in 1948.

The Sri Lanka Baptist Union, a member body of the BWA, has 22 churches and 4,011 members.