Public backlash targets French magazine after it published cartoons about Metrojet Airbus crash, described as ‘sacrilege’ by Kremlin

A hashtag meaning “I am not Charlie” has become the most popular on Russian social media after the magazine Charlie Hebdo published caricatures about the Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt.

The backlash began in response to two cartoons published by the French magazine on Wednesday. One showed plane wreckage and body parts falling on an Islamic State fighter with the caption,”IS: Russian aviation is intensifying bombardments”, referring to Moscow’s airstrikes in support of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria. The second featured a skull with a pair of sunglasses in front of plane debris and the title, “The dangers of Russian low-cost airlines”.

The crash of the Metrojet Airbus A321 in the Sinai peninsula last weekend has become a national tragedy in Russia. St Isaac’s Cathedral in St Petersburg, where the plane was bound, rang a bell 224 times on Sunday, once for each of the victims who died in the crash.

But suspicions voiced by David Cameron and other leaders that a terrorist bomb could have brought down the airliner continued to be met with scepticism. Even after President Vladimir Putin followed the UK’s lead and suspended flights to Egypt on Friday, his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, insisted that the decision did not mean that a bomb was the “main suspected cause” of the crash.

The cartoons caused outrage in Russia, becoming one of the top stories on state television news in recent days, and Peskov called them “sacrilege”. An article in the popular newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda accused the cartoonists of going “outside the bounds of morality”.

“There are people, and there is filth. The so-called journalists and caricaturists of the French weekly Charlie Hebdo are the latter,” the article said.

On Friday, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page, “Is anybody still Charlie?” The post was in reference to the slogan and hashtag “je suis Charlie” that appeared in support of the magazine after jihadi gunmen attacked its Paris offices in January killing 12 people, over caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.

Zakharova’s post has garnered more than 4,000 likes and dozens of comments and gave rise to the “I am not Charlie” online meme.

Georgy Lobushkin, press secretary of VK, the most popular Russian social network, posted on Saturday that “I am not Charlie” has become the most discussed hashtag on the network.

Twitter users were also posting with the hashtag. One cartoon making the rounds showed a devil-like creature roasting Charlie Hebdo staffers in a cauldron over a fire fuelled by copies of the magazine. ”They’ve raised the circulation of your little newspaper, so you won’t be cold now,” the devil declares.

If a terrorist attack is shown to have been the cause of the disaster, it could raise difficult questions about the Kremlin’s air campaign against Isis and Syrian opposition forces, which has so far proceeded without official Russian casualties.

Many officials bristled at the wave of support for Charlie Hebdo in January, arguing that such cartoons could offend the faithful. Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the mostly Muslim Chechnya region, held a huge protest against the caricatures at the time under the slogan, “I love the prophet Muhammad”.