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ANKARA, ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday condemned as a “vile provocation” a blasphemous cartoon in a satirical magazine.

The cartoon was criticized by religious conservatives and Erdogan’s ruling party, which called it an “Islamophobic hate crime,” even as the magazine Leman apologized to readers who felt offended and said it had been misunderstood.
“We will not allow anyone to speak against our sacred values,” Erdogan said in televised remarks, adding that authorities would closely follow the legal process.
“Those who show disrespect to our Prophet and other prophets will be held accountable before the law,” he said.
Four Leman cartoonists were detained late on Monday over the drawing.

Crowds rallied against Leman in central Istanbul on Tuesday, despite a ban on gatherings and a heavy police presence.
Late on Monday, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya shared a video on X showing police officers detaining Pehlevan, the cartoonist, with his hands cuffed behind his back as he was dragged up a stairwell.
He also shared videos of three other men being removed from their homes and dragged into vans, one of them barefoot.
“The individual who drew this vile image, D.P., has been apprehended and taken into custody. These shameless people will be held accountable before the law,” Yerlikaya wrote.
The government said an inquiry was launched under a penal code article that criminalizes incitement to hatred and enmity.
A group called Islamic Solidarity Platform called a protest on Tuesday, prompting police to shut Taksim Square and Istiklal, the city’s busy shopping thoroughfare.
The group of around 300 protesters shouted slogans at the magazine. According to a correspondent, the protesters were far less aggressive than those who rallied on Monday night, when around 400 people tried to storm a bar frequented by the
magazine staff.

ALGIERS: A court in Algeria on Tuesday upheld French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal’s five-year prison sentence in a case that has raised alarm over freedom of expression in Algeria and pushed tensions with France to the brink.
The ruling denies a request made by prosecutors at an appeal hearing last week. They asked a judge to give Sansal the maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. The “2084: The End of the World” author was charged in March under Algeria’s anti-terrorism laws and convicted of “undermining national unity,” receiving his initial five-year sentence then.

Sansal’s appeal was closely watched in both France and Algeria. It caps a saga that has turned the novelist into a unlikely cause célèbre, uniting francophone writers, members of France’s far right and European lawmakers in a rare chorus demanding his release.
The issue arose last year when, in an interview with a French right-wing media outlet, Sansal questioned Algeria’s current borders, arguing that France had redrawn them during the colonial period to include lands that once belonged to Morocco.
The 80-year-old dual citizen was arrested the following month and later lambasted by the president in a speech to Algeria’s parliament.
The case has unfolded at a historic low point in Algeria’s relations with France, which were strained further over the disputed Western Sahara.
The territorial dispute has long helped shape Algeria’s foreign policy, with its backing of the Polisario Front, a pro-independence group that operates out of refugee camps in southwestern Algeria.
France angered Algeria last year shifted its longstanding position to back regional rival Morocco’s sovereignty plan.
Analysts say that Sansal has become collateral damage in the broader diplomatic fallout and describe the charges as a political lever Algiers is deploying against Paris. Sansal’s supporters hope military-backed President Abdelmadjid Tebboune will grant a pardon on Saturday, when Algeria marks Independence Day and traditionally frees selected prisoners as part of a national amnesty.
“Now that a verdict has been handed down, we can imagine that clemency measures may be taken, especially because of our compatriot’s health,” French Prime Minister François Bayrou told reporters on Tuesday.
France’s Foreign Ministry said it “deplores” the decision to sentence Sansal to prison.
“This decision is both incomprehensible and unjustified,” it said in a statement.
The timing is dire, Sansal’s supporters in France and Algeria warn, as he battles prostate cancer and has spent part of his detention in a prison hospital. He appeared in court on Tuesday looking frail and without his trademark ponytail.
Before his arrest, Sansal’s work faced bans from Algerian authorities but he regularly traveled between Paris and Algiers without issue. His books — written in French — are little read in Algeria.
However, he has amassed a large following in France for books and essays in which he regularly criticizes Algeria’s leaders after 1962, when it won independence from French colonial rule, and the role of Islam in society.
Under the imprint of the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard, he has published 10 novels and won a prize for the best novel of the year, the Grand Prix du Roman, in 2015.