RA NA speaker accuses AAC leadership of working for Russian special services

ArmInfo. In an interview with Ekaterina Kotrikadze, the head of the news service and anchor for the Dozhd TV channel, which is opposed to the Russian government and is based in exile, Armenian Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan chose two scenarios to justify criminal prosecutions against the Catholicos of All Armenians and other church leaders.

"There is no confrontation with the Church; there is confrontation with people who serve interests that are often located outside the Republic of Armenia and serve their own personal financial and 'intimate' interests," he said. Simonyan apparently recalled stories of Catholic pedophiles, citing the example of "if in some country it turns out that a person holding a high position in the Church is a pedophile and law enforcement agencies react to this, or if some politician criticizes pedophilia, can this be considered an attack on the Church?"

"You can't hide behind a black cassock and think it's an indulgence and that you can do whatever you want. There are four or five people—high-ranking Church officials—who are mired in such situations, and there's also a document confirming that the brother of the current person who presents himself as the Catholicos is working for Russian foreign intelligence, as confirmed by a corresponding certificate bearing his signature."

Simonyan thus directly accused Russian intelligence agencies of recruiting agents into the AAC. "Yes, I mean Moscow. The example I cited speaks volumes," he said.

"There's another point. Many other Church officials also spoke out against these people, and the man who calls himself the Catholicos began defrocking them. And these are the highest-ranking representatives of the AAC. He and several of his associates have usurped power and can't even hold their regular hearings or meetings where matters are decided because they lack a quorum," Simonyan stated. It should be noted that Alen Simonyan based his accusations of working for Russian intelligence agencies on a "document" allegedly leaked online by pro-government bloggers. The document allegedly states that the Catholicos's brother, the head of the Russian and New Nakhichevan Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Yezras Nersisyan, had signed off on his work for the KGB of the USSR (not the SVR or the FSB of Russia – Ed.) allegedly in 1986-1987. Yezras Nersisyan called the published SNB document a forgery and denied all accusations against him. Veterans of the intelligence services also called this "paper" a forgery, if only because all documentation in the KGB of the USSR was kept exclusively in Russian. The "canard" was concocted in Armenian and completely failed to meet the standards of the time.