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Azatutyun Radiokayan (15 February 2026)

Naira Bulghadarian

Law-enforcement authorities indicted Catholicos Garegin II on Saturday one day after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian implicitly pledged to prevent an upcoming meeting in Austria of the top clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Garegin thus became the first the supreme head of the church prosecuted in Armenia’s post-Soviet history. Even Soviet authorities had never formally prosecuted an Armenian Catholicos.

The accusations levelled against Garegin stem from his January 27 decision to defrock a bishop involved in Pashinian’s controversial campaign to oust the Catholicos. The bishop, Gevorg Saroyan, was dismissed in January as head of the church’s Masyatsotn Diocese encompassing parts of Armenia’s southern Ararat province.

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