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The lawyer of Meghri Mayor Mkhitar Zakaryan filed a motion to Armenia’s prosecutor general to drop charges against her client.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, lawyer Gayane Papoyan denounced the charges as "manifestly unfounded and fabricated."

“I would like to remind you that both when challenging the legality of the detention and discussing the motion for his arrest, the courts ruled that there was no reasonable suspicion. In other words, Mkhitar Zakaryan's involvement in the act which he was accused of was not substantiated even at the level of reasonable suspicion. What is this if not political persecution?” she wrote.

The lawyer urged Prosecutor General Artur Davtyan to act in line with the Criminal Procedure Code and drop the “obviously fabricated” charges.

The mayor of Meghri, a town in Armenia’s Syunik Province, was among several other local government officials detained after angry protests during Nikol Pashinyan’s visit to the region last week.

Mkhitar Zakaryan has been charged with hooliganism under Article 258 of the Criminal Code of Armenia.

Both in the case of Zakaryan and other residents of Syunik, the Yerevan courts found their detention unlawful and in most cases did not approve the requests for their arrest.