Another priest arrested in Armenia, accused of plotting against the government

Armenia has arrested a second senior cleric on charges of plotting against the government, the latest escalation in a crackdown on outspoken critics of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

A court in Yerevan today ordered Archbishop Michael Ajapahiyan to be held in custody for two months, his lawyer Ara Zohrabyan said.

He said the decision was "clearly illegal and unfounded" and added that his client would appeal.

State prosecutors accuse Ajapahiyan of publicly calling for the armed overthrow of the government.

On Friday, security forces confronted a crowd at the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church outside Yerevan as they attempted to arrest Ajapakhian.

Videos circulating on social media show priests jostling with police, while the bells of a nearby cathedral ring.

Last week, the Security Service summoned Ajapahyan for questioning and he came to the Investigative Committee building. "I have never been in hiding and I will not be in hiding now," Ajapahyan told reporters on Friday.

"I say that what is happening now is lawlessness. I have never been and am not a threat to this country, the main threat is in the government," he pointed out.

Last year, tens of thousands of protesters demanded Pashinyan's removal after Armenia agreed to hand over control of several border villages to Azerbaijan and normalize relations with it, even though they are bitter rivals.

On Wednesday, authorities arrested Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, who leads the opposition movement Holy Struggle. He is accused of planning a sabotage campaign to overthrow Pashinyan, a charge his lawyer has denied.

Members of the "Holy Struggle" movement, which fiercely opposed the surrender of border villages, accused the government of suppressing political rights.

Although territorial concessions were the movement's key issue, they have expanded to include a wide range of grievances against Pashinyan, who has been in power since 2018.

Another vocal critic of Pashinyan, Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetoyan, was arrested last week on charges of calling for the overthrow of the government, which he denied.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been embroiled in territorial disputes since the early 1990s, as various parts of the Soviet Union (USSR) insisted on independence from Moscow.

After the USSR collapsed in 1991, ethnic Armenian separatist forces, supported by the Armenian military, seized control of the Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh and nearby territories.

In 2020, Azerbaijan regained large swathes of territory held by Armenian forces for nearly three decades. A lightning military campaign in September 2023 saw Azerbaijan fully regain control of Nagorno-Karabakh, with Armenia later handing over border villages.

Pashinyan has recently sought to normalize relations with Azerbaijan.

Last week, he also visited Azerbaijan's main ally, Turkey, to mend the historical rift.

Turkey and Armenia have a more than century-old dispute over the deaths of an estimated 1,5 million Armenians in massacres, deportations and forced marches that began in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey.

Historians generally consider the event a genocide. Turkey vehemently denies this, although it acknowledges that many people lost their lives, but insists that their numbers are exaggerated and that it was all the result of civil unrest, not the actions of the Turkish state.