PAKISTAN blocked Twitter today over a competition to post caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad on the social networking site.



"The website has been banned by Ministry of Information Technology and the decision was conveyed to us. There was blasphemous material on Twitter," Mohammad Younis Khan, spokesman for Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), said.



Asked about the nature of the "blasphemous" content, Khan said there had been a planned competition to "post caricatures of Prophet Muhammad".



An official from the ministry said it had requested several times that no such competition be put on Twitter, but the website had failed to respond.



Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous. Muslims across the globe staged angry protests over the publication of satirical cartoons of Muhammad in European newspapers four years ago.



In 2008, a suicide attack outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad killed eight people. Al-Qaeda claimed the attack, saying it was to avenge the cartoons.



Pakistan blocked Facebook and YouTube in mid-2010 because of similar "blasphemous" content.