Five Turkish heavy metal fans got more than they bargained for in Istanbul last weekend when they made ‘devil horn’ salutes at a passing cavalcade.

The Irish Times has the full story:

“The tinted windows of one of the cars opened and a guy in dark glasses shouted: ‘What the hell are you doing?’” says Yusuf Sengul, who was attending the first day of a metal festival with his friends.

Five minutes later, the men in black came back with police, bundled Sengul and four others into cars and took them to a police station.

“They said they were acting on the orders of the prime minister,” Sengul remembers. “We were laughing. We thought it was a joke.”

But it wasn’t. Accused of “disrespect of a senior official”, the five youngsters spent the rest of the day and night being taken from one police station to another.

All five were released without charge after 21 hours in custody, but not before they had been handcuffed, fingerprinted, subjected to repeated questioning and – bizarrely – forced by the police to listen to a cocktail of classical Turkish music and pop.

“I unfortunately saw the state of some of our young people, and it was depressing,” prime minister Tayyip Erdogan told reporters the day after, before news of the arrests had appeared in the media.

“This endless, uncontrolled moral erosion is really worrying. We must defend our family structure.”