Turkey investigates actress for 'record rape in Medina' tweet

Turkish prosecutors Wednesday launched an investigation into a prominent actress on charges that she denigrated religious values over a tweet, where she argued against the death penalty by pointing to the allegedly high number of rapes in the holy Saudi city of Medina.

In the tweet, actress Berna Lacin strongly argued against reintroducing the death penalty in Turkey after a recent spate of sexual abuse crimes against children prompted calls for it to come back.

She said the death penalty did not stop what she described as the "record number of rape incidents" in the Islam's holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia.

"If the death penalty was a solution, the lands of Medina would not break the record for rape incidents," Lacin tweeted on Tuesday.

She did not give statistics to back the assertion. According to Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia was in 2017 the third most prolific user of the death penalty worldwide after China and Iran.

The chief prosecutor's office in Istanbul said the probe had been launched after intense public reactions to the tweet, on accusations of "denigrating people's religious values", the official Anadolu news agency reported.

Lacin later defended herself, saying that she did not make any statement on Islam. 

"I did not say a single word on Islam, why shall I speak on my own religion? Am I crazy?" she tweeted.

Capital punishment was abolished in Turkey in 2004 as part of reforms as Ankara made a serious bid for membership in the European Union.

However, there have been increasing calls in recent years to reinstate it especially after the failed 2016 coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government. 

The Turkish government is also under fire to take tougher action including death penalty after reports of physical and sexual violence against children and women sparked outrage.  

The Turkish authorities are also taking an increasingly tough line against those deemed to have insulted religious values in social media postings or journalism.

In 2016, two prominent Turkish journalists, Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya, were sentenced to two years in jail for "insulting religious values" after they illustrated their newspaper columns with a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed originally published in the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.