Turkish police detained three more employees of a satirical magazine on Tuesday, raising the number of people taken into custody over a cartoon that allegedly depicted the Prophet Muhammad to four.
The cartoon, published in LeMan magazine, drew a string of condemnation from government officials who stated it represented the Prophet Muhammad and sparked an angry protest outside the magazine’s Istanbul office.
LeMan, in a statement late Monday, denied the allegations and insisted the drawing was intended to portray a Muslim man named Muhammad and was meant to highlight the suffering of Muslims.
The pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper said the cartoon showed “two figures alleged to be Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Moses – with wings and halos – shaking hands in the sky, while a war scene unfolds below with bombs raining down.” The independent Birgun newspaper also said the winged figures hovering in the sky were interpreted by some as Prophets Muhammad and Moses.
Authorities on Monday launched an investigation into the weekly magazine over accusations of “publicly insulting religious values” and detained the cartoonist, Dogan Pehlevan, from his home.
OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty Images 
Overnight, LeMan’s Editor-in-Chief Zafer Aknar, graphic designer Cebrail Okcu and manager Ali Yavuz were also detained, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. Detention warrants were also issued for two editors who are believed to be abroad, the report said.
Late on Monday, demonstrators, reportedly belonging to an Islamic group, hurled rocks at LeMan’s headquarters in central Istanbul and scuffled with police.
The publication apologized for any offense caused, but it also called on authorities to act against what it described as a smear campaign and to protect freedom of expression.
Separate videos of the arrests, shared by Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, showed Pehlevan and Yavuz being forcibly taken from their homes, their hands being cuffed behind their backs.
“These shameless people will be held accountable before the law,” Yerlikaya wrote on X.
“You will not escape from our security forces or from justice,” Yerlikaya wrote in a separate post.
“An act of annihilation”
But the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Tuncay Akgun, told AFP by phone from Paris that the image had been misinterpreted and was “not a caricature of Prophet Mohammed.”
“In this work, the name of a Muslim who was killed in the bombardments of Israel is fictionalized as Mohammed. More than 200 million people in the Islamic world are named Mohammed,” he said, saying it had “nothing to do with Prophet Mohammed.
“We would never take such a risk,” he said.
Police had also taken over the magazine’s offices on Istiklal Avenue and arrest warrants had been issued for several other of the magazine’s executives, presidential press aide Fahrettin Altin wrote on X.
In a string of posts on X, LeMan defended the cartoon and said it had been deliberately misinterpreted to cause a provocation.
“The cartoonist wanted to portray the righteousness of the oppressed Muslim people by depicting a Muslim killed by Israel, he never intended to belittle religious values,” it said.
Akgun said the legal attack on the magazine, a satirical bastion of opposition which was founded in 1991, was “incredibly shocking but not very surprising.”
“This is an act of annihilation. Ministers are involved in the whole business, a cartoon is distorted,” he said.
“Drawing similarities with Charlie Hebdo is very intentional and very worrying,” he said of the French satirical magazine whose offices were stormed by Islamist gunmen in 2015.
The attack, which killed 12 people, occurred after it published caricatures lampooning the Prophet Mohammed.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.