Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian was arrested on June 27 the day after Pashinian threatened to forcibly remove the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church from his Echmiadzin headquarters. Security forces met with fierce resistance from hundreds of angry priests and laymen when they raided the Mother See in a failed bid to demonstratively detain Ajapahian there. The latter surrendered to investigators several hours after the unprecedented raid.
The case against the 62-year-old cleric highly critical of the government is based on a June 2025 interview in which he discussed the need for a coup d’etat in the country. The Office of the Prosecutor-General had concluded that similar remarks made by him in previous years do not warrant criminal charges.
Ajapahian, who heads the church diocese in Armenia’s Shirak province, rejected the accusation as politically motivated during his unusually quick trial which ended on October 3 in a two-year prison sentence handed to him by a court of first instance. He appealed against the verdict. His lawyers maintain that the respected cleric must be acquitted because he simply expressed a political opinion and never planned to try to put it into practice.
The trial prosecutors also lodged an appeal, saying that Ajapahian’s prison sentence should be extended to two and a half years. They were conspicuously absent from the opening court hearing on the appeals. The Office of the Prosecutor-General said the Court of Appeals failed to “properly” notify them about the hearing.
It took place just days after law-enforcement authorities reluctantly allowed Ajapahian to undergo urgent surgery at a Yerevan hospital of his choice, the Izmirlian Medical Center. They insisted until last week that he should be operated on at a prison hospital. Ajapahian told reporters in the courtroom that he will be transferred to the Izmirlian hospital on Tuesday.
Ajapahian was taken into custody two days after another archbishop, Bagrat Galstanian, and his 15 supporters were arrested on charges of plotting “terrorist acts” in a bid to seize power. They all deny the charges.
Later in October, the authorities arrested Bishop Mkrtich Proshian, Garegin’s nephew heading another church diocese. They claim that Proshian had forced his subordinates to attend opposition rallies in Yerevan, a charge he strongly denies.
The crackdown on clergy loyal to Garegin continued with the arrest on December 4 of Archbishop Arshak Khachatrian, the head of the church’s Mother See Chancellery in Echmiadzin. Khachatrian is facing drug-related charges rejected by him as politically motivated.