YEREVAN, Armenia — YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — A outstanding cleric in Armenia was sentenced to 2 years in jail on Friday after being discovered responsible of calling for an overthrow of the federal government.
Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was arrested in June and accused of being a part of an alleged coup plot towards the federal government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
The cleric was discovered responsible on Sept. 24 of calling for the federal government to be overthrown. His lawyer, Ara Zohrabyan, condemned the decision as being politically motivated.
Ajapahyan was prosecuted for merely expressing an opinion, mentioned Zohrabyan, who vowed to attraction the decision.
The Armenian Apostolic Church additionally condemned the decision as politically motivated, describing it as “one of many clear manifestations of the authorities’ anti-church marketing campaign.”
The authorities had tried to detain Ajapahyan in June, which led to safety forces dealing with off with crowds on the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Movies circulated on-line confirmed clergymen jostling with police.
After Armenia’s Nationwide Safety Service urged Ajapahyan to seem earlier than authorities, native media confirmed him getting into the constructing of Armenia’s Investigative Committee. The next day, a courtroom in Yerevan ordered to put Ajapahyan in pretrial detention.
Ajapahyan’s arrest adopted that of Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, who lead the Sacred Wrestle opposition motion. He was accused of plotting a sabotage marketing campaign to overthrow Pashinyan, prices that his lawyer rejected as “fiction.”
In April 2024, tens of hundreds of demonstrators known as for Pashinyan’s ouster after Armenia agreed handy over management of a number of border villages to Azerbaijan and to normalize relations between the neighbors.
Sacred Wrestle has bitterly opposed the handover of the border villages. Though the territorial concession was the motion’s core subject, it has expanded to a wide selection of complaints about Pashinyan, who got here to energy in 2018.
Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, who’s one other vocal critic of Pashinyan, was additionally arrested in June on prices of calling for the federal government’s overthrow, which he denied.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in territorial disputes for the reason that early Nineties, as varied elements of the Soviet Union pressed for independence from Moscow. After the USSR collapsed in 1991, ethnic Armenian separatist forces backed by the Armenian army gained management of Azerbaijan’s area of Karabakh and close by territories.
In 2020, Azerbaijan recaptured broad swaths of territory in and round Karabakh. A lightning army marketing campaign in September 2023 noticed Azerbaijan absolutely reclaim management of the area, and Armenia later handed over the border villages.
In August, the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan shook palms at a White Home summit earlier than signing a deal aimed toward ending a long time of battle. A proper peace treaty was initiated by the 2 nations’ international ministers at that assembly, however it’s but to be signed by the leaders and ratified by the nations’ parliament.
