Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Wednesday hit out at the magazine that ran a mocked up front page showing him taken a “selfie” photograph in front of a soldier’s coffin.

The image produced by Nokta led to the magazine’s Istanbul’s offices being raided by police Monday and every copy seized.

Speaking in a live interview on state broadcaster TRT, Erdogan said: “I have never taken a selfie in my life... and I am not so dishonorable as to turn my back on a martyr’s coffin. But those who made this cover are dishonorable, ignoble.”

The president said he would do “what is necessary” to pursue those responsible for the image, which shows him in shirt sleeves as a flag-draped coffin carried by soldiers passes behind, and said he had instructed his legal team.

Asked about freedom of the press to include him in a mocking image, Erdogan said no-one was entitled to breach an individual’s freedom in the name of media freedom.

He described the image as an “attack” on himself.

The Turkish penal code makes insulting the president a crime punishable by up to four years imprisonment.

Nokta is being investigated over “contents that insult the president” and producing terrorist propaganda. The magazine`s editor-in-chief Murat Capan was arrested and later released although he is banned from travelling and must report to the police weekly.

Turning to the renewed Kurdish conflict, Erdogan defended the military operations against PKK terrorists in Cizre, a town near the Syrian and Iraqi borders in southeast Turkey.

The town was placed under an eight-day curfew that ended over the weekend, only for it to be briefly reimposed.

Erdogan said the local governor enforced the curfew, which effectively cut the town off from the outside world, for the “peace of people” and to allow the security forces to “easily” conduct anti-terror operations.

“Why is this curfew declared?” he asked. “The streets are banned during certain hours. If someone goes out, he is a terrorist.”

He said police and soldiers had been attacked “villainously” by the PKK before the curfew was put in place.

“The world is not sincere in this issue, has always stayed away from us and unfortunately partially supported them [the PKK],” Erdogan said.

Turning to the situation in east Jerusalem, where Israeli security forces clashed with Palestinian youths around the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound earlier in the week, Erdogan said Israel was making a mistake by provoking confrontation and antagonizing the Muslim world.

“I hope this issue will immediately be solved,” he said, adding he would talk and raise the issue with world leaders including US President Barack Obama.

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