Satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo was slammed on social media for a cartoon depicting victims of the recent central Italy quake as pasta dishes.
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The Italian news agency ANSA quoted the mayor of Amatrice, the hardest-hit town where more than 230 bodies were found after the August 24 quake, as calling the cartoon “tasteless and embarrassing”.
A woman with a badly bruised or burned face was “penne au gratin”, a severely bleeding man was labelled “penne with tomato sauce” and a pile of victims pancaked beneath a collapsed building, their legs sticking out from the bloodied rubble, were “lasagna”.
The quake in the central Apennines Mountain region claimed almost 300 lives, injured hundreds of people and left thousands of residents homeless when several towns and hamlets were devastated.
The town is the home of the all’amatriciana pasta dish. It evidentially irked the town’s mayor, Sergio Pirozzi, who described the cartoon as an “unpleasant and embarrassing satire”.
Italy was hit by a 6.2-magnitude quake last week.
Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris were the scene of a deadly jihadist attack in January a year ago.
“How the f– do you draw a cartoon about the dead?” he said, according to state news agency Ansa.
Fury on social media reached such a pitch the French embassy in Rome was moved to issue a statement emphasing that the government did not share the magazine’s sentiments and could not be held responsible for them.
Many just wrote, “I’m no longer Charlie Hebdo”.
There was a wave of worldwide sympathy for the magazine and its staff after that attack. The rampage was linked to the journal’s printing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, said: “This isn’t satire; it’s garbage”.
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Charlie Hebdo responded to the controversy by publishing yet another quake cartoon on its Facebook page that refers to the fact that in the past organised crime has been found to control various Italian construction companies.
