A Turkish court has banned Web pages that show the new cover of Charlie Hebdo, the country”s semiofficial news agency Anadolu reported Wednesday.
The move came as Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan wrote on Twitter, “Those who are publishing figures referring to our supreme Prophet are those who disregard the sacred.” Such a move is “open sedition and provocation,” he added.
Turkey is home to 82 million people, 99.8% of whom are Muslim, according to the CIA World Factbook.
The French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo’s new cover, published a week after a terrorist attack on the magazine by Islamist extremists, contains what it calls a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed holding a sign saying “Je suis Charlie.” The caption says “All is forgiven” in French.
Earlier, police went to the offices of an Istanbul paper and blocked off traffic around it after two columnists included small images of the cover with their columns, the paper reported.
Armored police blocked the entrance and stopped distribution trucks at the printing press in Istanbul, the secular daily Cumhuriyet reported.
The prosecutor’s office then stopped the blockade, possibly because it did not know the image was inside the paper, according to the report. The prosecutor’s office saw a sample of the Cumhuriyet issue in which the image was apparently not included, the report said.
An op-ed in the newspaper said the drawing on the Charlie Hebdo cover did not seem to have “anything to do with Prophet Mohammed. That drawing is a symbol of a humane and conscientious attitude and it says, ‘All is forgiven.'”
Cumhuriyet editor-in-chief Utku Cakirozer explained on Twitter and on the newspaper’s website that Cumhuriyet “has lost writers to terror attacks” and “understands the Charlie Hebdo massacre very well.”