YEREVAN—Supporters and family members of imprisoned Armenian American Garo Yegnukian were detained early on Sept. 19 in Yerevan’s city center for holding a demonstration and distributing flyers urging for his release.

Yegnukian’s wife Rouzanna, his children Hagop, Hripsimeh, and Elmon, as well as Aghavni Sahakyan and Geghetsik Tonoyan of the Armenian Women’s Front were detained, but the six were released shortly after their arrest, various sources reported.

Armenia’s Hetq investigative news outlet reported that a spokesperson for the Armenian Women’s Front said when members of the arrested group asked police why they had been detained, the police responded that they been tipped off that Yegnukian’s wife and their children intended to place a bomb in Republic Square.

Yegnukian family lawyer Tigran Hayrapetyan also told Hetq that it took officers four hours to search the detainees after being transferred to a local police station.

Yegnukian, a U.S. citizen, was arrested on July 20, 2016, and has been held in pretrial detention since his arrest. Yegnukian was charged with assisting the armed group Sasna Tsrer.

“The charges brought against Yegnukian are fabricated. No one would have thought that he might be charged for such acts,” Hayrapetyan told a court last September.

An outspoken critic of Armenia’s ruling regime, Yegnukian was born in 1959 in Soviet Armenia, from where his family (parents, grandmother and brother) emigrated in 1971. They arrived and eventually settled in New York in 1973. In 1981, he graduated from Pace University with a B.A. in Marketing and, in 1988, graduated from St. John’s University Law School and was admitted to the New York State Bar.

“That Armenia’s modern-day Soviet-style totalitarian government is punishing [Yegnukian] is no surprise, but that he is the only U.S. citizen being held as a political prisoner in Armenia and the U.S. State Department and U.S. Embassy have remained relatively silent about his case for over 13 months is of utmost concern,” read a press communique released by Yegnukian’s friends and supporters in August. “The U.S. government has done so much for political prisoners around the world, often for non-U.S. citizens, but Garo Yegnukian’s case seems to have fallen through the cracks of justice.”