Publishers say they have closed down Turkey's once top-selling satirical magazine following a cartoon that was deemed to be offensive

The publisher of one of Turkey's most prominent cartoon magazines on Friday shut down the weekly and fired all its staff after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Moses.

Gırgır had published in its latest edition a cartoon showing the bearded Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt, with his companions complaining and using vulgar curse words.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalın tweeted after the publication of the Gırgır cartoon that "this has nothing to do with freedom of speech or humour. This is immoral and a hate crime." The cartoon was also angrily condemned by the editor in chief of Istanbul's Jewish weekly Shalom Ivo Molinas who tweeted: "What a disgrace! What disrespect!"

The publishers blamed the cartoon on a deliberate attempt to "put the company in a difficult situation" and said it would inform prosecutors of which employees were behind it.

Gırgır has since 2015 been published by the group of the Sözcü newspaper, a nationalist daily.

Gırgır, established in 1972, was Turkey's largest selling satirical magazine in the 1980s and 1990s. Although it was briefly shut down following the 1980 military coup, it had a cult following mostly due to the fact that it got political messages across through cartoons, escaping censorship.