Dozens of Korean Protestant missionaries have entered the Republic of Dagestan and neighboring Chechnya.

The Korean Foreign Ministry has called on the missionaries to leave the dangerous regions immediately and has enlisted the help of other ministries in getting all 44 of them out of the two countries.

The missionaries, including ten pastors, arrived in Moscow on January eleventh before making their way to the Dagestan region by bus the following day, claiming they went as volunteers, not for religious reasons.

The missionaries are members of an organization which provided support for a group of Korean Christian volunteer workers who were released after more than a month of captivity by the Taliban in Afghanistan in July 2007.