(Reuters) -A new order to arrest a senior clergyman over allegations of plotting to overthrow the government triggered scuffles outside the most celebrated church in Armenia on Friday, according to Armenian news reports.
Video posted on Armenian news sites showed security forces jostling with a crowd outside the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church near Yerevan, the capital, as they tried to detain Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan.
The officers withdrew from the area outside the cathedral in Etchmiadzin, and the reports said the archbishop agreed to discuss the allegations with representatives of the Armenian Investigative Committee. A court was to rule on whether to keep Ajapahyan in detention.
The unrest erupted two days after another prominent cleric, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, was detained, the latest stage in an increasingly acrimonious confrontation pitting the church against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his government.
Galstanyan faces charges, along with 13 others, of plotting to overthrow the government. Both clergymen deny any wrongdoing.
The Armenian church denounced the street confrontation, saying the day “will remain in the modern history of our people as a day of national shame because of the shameful actions of Armenian authorities against the Armenian church”.
Pashinyan, who faces an election next year, said this week that the authorities had thwarted a “large and sinister plan by the ‘criminal-oligarchic clergy'” to take power in Armenia, a former Soviet republic in the South Caucasus.
Some senior clerics have previously called for Pashinyan to step down over Armenia’s military defeats against Azerbaijan after decades of hostilities.
Pashinyan rose to power on a wave of street protests in 2018, but came under heavy domestic pressure after major losses in a second major conflict with Azerbaijan in 2020.
In 2023, Azerbaijan retook the whole of the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where ethnic Armenians had enjoyed de facto independence for decades.
Tensions between the two neighbours remain high and the number of reported ceasefire violations has surged this year.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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