ANKARA, Turkey – Police on Wednesday stopped trucks as they left a pro-secular newspaper’s printing centre and checked the paper’s content after it decided to print a selection of Charlie Hebdo caricatures, the paper said.
Cumhuriyet newspaper said police allowed distribution to proceed after verifying that the satirical French newspaper’s controversial cover featuring the Prophet Muhammad was not published.
The paper printed a four-page selection of cartoons and articles on Wednesday in a show of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo but left out cartoons which Muslims may find offensive. However, two Cumhuriyet columnists used small, black-and-white images of the Charlie Hebdo cover as their column headers in Wednesday’s issue.
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“While preparing this selection, we respected societies’ freedoms of faith and religious sensitivities,” said Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief Uktu Cakirozer.
“Following a large number of consultations we decided not to include the magazine’s cover page,” Cakirozer said. He did not mention the two columnists’ decision to use images of the cover in their columns.
Caricatures featured in Cumhuriyet included some depicting Pope Francis and French President Francois Hollande and one referring to a massacre by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Police intensified security outside Cumhuriyet’s headquarter and printing centre as a precaution. A small group of pro-Islamic students staged a protest outside the paper’s office in Ankara, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
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