Bagrat Galstanyan, the former leader of Tavush Diocese, who has been in prison for 5 months on charges of terrorism, was extended for another three months.
Despite the claims of the high-ranking cleric and his lawyers that the charges against him and more than a dozen people arrested on the same day are false and that they do not see any reason to keep them in custody, the public prosecutor insisted that he can obstruct and hide from the investigation while he is free. The judge considered the petition of the accuser to be valid and left his restraining order unchanged.
In the summer, the investigative agency published various papers, wiretaps and claimed that Galstanyan and his associates had “planned to carry out acts of terrorism and seizure of power in Armenia” under the name of the “Holy Struggle” movement. And in order to achieve the result, they had to use prohibited means – weapons and explosives. According to the law enforcement officers, the important thing was not the gatherings that the movement organized regularly, but the emerging 25-person groups, which were supposed to weaken the government with various actions, to achieve usurpation of power. None of the 18 defendants in this case plead guilty.