Turkey blocksTwitter, YouTube

Turkey has blocked access to Twitter and YouTube over the publication of photographs of an Istanbul prosecutor held at gunpoint by far-left militants hours before he was killed in a shootout last week, officials said.

Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said a prosecutor had sought the block on access to social media sites because some media organisations had acted “as if they were spreading terrorist propaganda” in sharing the images.

“This has to do with the publishing of the prosecutor’s picture,” Kalin told a news conference in Ankara. “What happened in the aftermath [of the prosecutor’s killing] is as grim as the incident itself.