The longtime mayor of Ankara accused Israel’s Mossad of masterminding last week’s terror attacks in France.

Melih Gokcek said Israeli intelligence planned the attacks in retaliation for France recently expressing support for Palestinian statehood, according to Today’s Zaman, an English-language Turkish publication, citing the Andalou news agency.

At a political event Sunday, Gokcek said it “is certain that Mossad is behind these kinds of incidents. Mossad enflames Islamophobia by causing such incidents.”

The head of Turkey’s capital city also claimed that following the Paris attacks, approximately 50 mosques and some Muslim individuals were targeted but there was no coverage from the international media.

On Twitter last summer, Gokceck called for the Israeli Consulate in Turkey to close because “we don’t want a representative of murderers in Turkey.

Gokcek has been mayor of Ankara, Turkey’s second largest city, since 1994.

Turkish police officers speak with security guards outside the Cumhuriyet Daily Newspaper building on January 14, 2015 in istanbul. A leading daily in overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey risked a backlash by printing excerpts from the first edition of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo since Islamist gunmen massacred 12 people in an attack on its offices.

Meanwhile, a leading daily in overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey on Wednesday risked a backlash by printing excerpts from the first edition of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo since gunmen massacred 12 people in an attack on its offices.

The daily Cumhuriyet, which strongly opposes President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, printed a four-page pull-out containing cartoons and articles translated into Turkish from the historic Charlie Hebdo issue.

Along with a Charlie Hebdo editorial about how it would not give into the attacks, the excerpts in Cumhuriyet included cartoons satirising Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram and ISIS terrorists.

The pull-out edition did not include the controversial front cover of the new Charlie Hebdo, which shows a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.

However a smaller version of that cartoon, where the prophet sheds a tear and holds a sign saying a sign that says "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie"), was included on page five of the newspaper itself in a column by Cumhuriyet commentator Hikmet Cetinkaya.

Many Muslims consider images of the Prophet, not least ones satirising him, to be blasphemous under Islam and Turkey's Islamic-rooted leaders in the past angrily denounced such cartoons.