This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A man who depicted Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the Lord of the Rings character Gollum has been convicted of insulting the Turkish president and handed a suspended jail sentence.

According to Turkish media reports, a court in the south-west province of Antalya on Thursday sentenced Rifat Çetin to a year in prison, suspended for five years. The court also stripped Cetin of his parental custody rights.

Çetin posted an image on Facebook in 2014 in which he combined three pictures of Erdoğan with Gollum, the newspaper Hürriyet said.



Çetin told another newspaper, the daily BirGün, that he planned to appeal against the verdict as Erdoğan had been prime minister, not president, when the image was posted.

Erdoğan's 'Gollum insult' a mistake, says Lord of the Rings director Read more

Prosecutors have accused more than 1,800 people, including cartoonists and a former Miss Turkey, of insulting Erdoğan, who has dominated and polarised Turkish politics for a decade and a half.

Another man, Bilgin Çiftçi, is being tried for sharing an identically juxtaposed picture of Erdoğan and Gollum, his lawyer said in December. The offence of insulting the president is punishable by up to four years in prison.

Gollum appears in Tolkien’s tale The Hobbit and his Lord of the Rings trilogy. The creature is portrayed as both an antagonist of the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and a victim of the most powerful of the trilogy’s eponymous rings, which has twisted his mind and body.