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Bangladesh has blocked social networking website Facebook over caricatures of the Noble Prophet Mohammad and “obnoxious” images of the Muslim-majority country's leaders, officials say.
The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) said the site was blocked on Saturday because cartoons of the noble Prophet hurt the religious sentiments of the country's Muslim population.
The move comes a week after Pakistani authorities banned access to Facebook for similar reasons. They also blocked the video website YouTube and 1,200 web pages over a row about blasphemous content on the internet.
Delwar said Facebook would be re-opened once Bangladesh had permanently blocked the offending pages.
Protests
The country's anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) said it had arrested one man over the images of political leaders.
"A special intelligence team arrested him and he has been charged with spreading malice," Enamul Kabir, a senior RAB official, said.
Kabir said the arrested man used at least six Facebook accounts to post the images but officials declined to give details of the depictions, which were not immediately showing up on the site on Sunday.
On Friday thousands of Bangladeshis took to the streets of the capital, Dhaka, demanding that the government ban Facebook over what they called anti-Islamic propaganda.
"Drawing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad is an attack on Islam and is extremely humiliating for Islam," Hemayet Uddin, a Dhaka protest organizer, told thousands of cheering supporters.
Pakistan has restored access to YouTube, but Facebook and 1,200 web pages remain blocked.
PHOTO CAPTION
Bangladeshis protest against the social networking site Facebook in Dhaka on May 28, 2010.
Al-Jazeera
