Yez got nuttin' on me, coppers! Nuttin'!
one of the country's most prominent cartoonists to serve out a 14 month sentence first handed down last year on charges of insulting President Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey...,
Nuri Kurtcebe, 69, was detained and sent to prison Monday after a police check found him on a bus travelling in the northwestern
His lawyer Erdem Akyuz told the media that the authorities were enforcing the sentence after an appeal was turned down by an upper court.
Kurtcebe was sentenced to a one year, two months and 15 days jail term for several caricatures he drew in 2015.
As is customary in
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
, he had been allowed to remain free while the appeal was pending. But once the appeal was rejected, an arrest warrant was issued.
"What's recognised in all over the world is that artists express their work freely and that politicians, compared to others, are more tolerant to criticism," Akyuz was quoted as saying by Dogan.
Akyuz also said that it was not clear in the court's ruling which cartoons or expressions were the source of the charges.
Kurtcebe, whose daily cartoons were published in the Aydinlik newspaper, also drew for a number of publications including Hurriyet and opposition Cumhuriyet newspapers as well as satirical magazine Girgir.
Musa Kart, a Cumhuriyet cartoonist who was sentenced to three years and nine months jail in April on charges of aiding outlawed "terrorist organizations" along with several other staff, lashed out at the court's verdict.
"It seems that the ruling party has not yet given up on its idea of neutralising cartoonists with prison sentences," he said, quoted by Cumhuriyet.
"I hope and wish that this political climate deprived of a sense of humour will change on June 25," he said.
Turkey is heading for parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24 when Erdogan is seeking a new mandate under the expanded powers of a full executive presidency.
Thousands of Turks, from a top model to high school students, have been prosecuted on charges of insulting Erdogan since he became president in 2014.