Mehmet Barlas, a staunchly pro-government Turkish columnist, has claimed the United States sendsspecial bombs against its enemies that trigger homosexuality among the male population or dispatches normal bombs that are intended to kill theentire population.

Barlas made the controversial remarks in his column in the pro-government Sabah daily on Monday, which is run by the brother of Berat Albrayrak, Turkey’s finance minister and the son-in-law of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Nowadays, tensions are running high between the US and Turkey over a Turkish court decision to put American pastor Andrew Brunson under house arrest after almost two years in pretrial detention rather than release him as demanded by the US administration.

Barlas said the US conducted scientific work in 1944 for the production of a bomb that would trigger homosexuality among Japanese soldiers during World War II. He said the documents for this work were obtained by the University of California at Berkeley several years ago.

“When the US becomes an enemy of a country and decides to fight against it, it plans to drop a bomb that will either change the sexual orientation of the people of that country or that will kill all the people of that country,” Barlas wrote.