Close on the heels of Pakistan’s May 19 decision to ban social networking site Facebook over “blasphemous content” – with a Facebook page having asked people to draw images of Islam's Prophet Mohammed -, Bangladesh too has blocked access to the site after sardonic images of the prophet and the country’s leaders were recently uploaded.

Protesting against the contentious “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” contest announced on a Facebook page - which encouraged users to post satirical images of the prophet -, thousands of Muslims held anti-Facebook demonstrations in Dhaka on Friday.

According to the information forwarded by a Bangladeshi official to the AFP news agency, one man has been arrested and charged for using the images for “spreading malice and insulting the country’s leaders.”

Noting that Facebook had “hurt the religious sentiments of the country’s majority Muslim population” by carrying “offensive images” of the prophet, Hasan Mahmud Delwar – the acting chairperson of the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission – said: “Some links in the site also contained obnoxious images of our leaders including the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the leader of the opposition.”

However, the decision to ban Facebook in Bangladesh has disappointed some of the site’s avid users, who opine that the government should have blocked only “the objectionable page rather than blocking the entire site.”