A court in Armenia has sentenced a well-known archbishop to two years in prison after finding him guilty of calling for regime change in what his church has condemned as a politically motivated trial, Armenian site CivilNet reports.

The acrimonious confrontation, pitting the Armenian Apostolic Church against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his government, has resulted in a number of prominent clerics arrested on charges of attempts to incite violent coups.

Alongside Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan, who was sentenced on Friday, another noted cleric, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, who led street protests against Pashinyan last year, is also in pre-trial detention facing criminal charges.

Ajapahyan was arrested in June over an interview he gave the previous year in which he said there was a

See Full Page