Turkey increasingly hard-line government blocked access over the images of an Istanbul prosecutor held hostage Twitter and Facebook "comply" with court ruling against publishing the images.The ban comes a year after the same networks were blocked in the run-up to local elections in March 2014.
In the period leading up to the websites being blocked, recordings purportedly suggesting corruption among Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's then prime minister circle were shared online.
Mehmet Selim Kiraz, the Istanbul prosecutor seen in the pictures, was later killed in a shoot-out between his hostage takers and police last week.
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"Twitter has agreed to shut down accounts and remove images relating to last week's hostage-taking. The website will reopen to access very shortly," the senior official told Reuters before the site became accessible again.
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The DHKP-C had published a picture of Kiraz with a gun to his head and said it would kill him unless its demands were met.
"The wife and children of prosecutor Kiraz have been deeply upset. The images are everywhere," the Turkish official said.
Google said it was working to restore service to the YouTube video-sharing site, which it owns. Turkey's telecoms regulator could not immediately be reached and there was no statement on its website.
Turkey temporarily blocked Twitter and YouTube before local elections in March 2014, after audio recordings purportedly showing corruption in then-Prime Minister Erdogan's inner circle were leaked on their sites. That decision caused a public uproar and drew heavy international criticism.
Turkey filed over five times more content-removal requests to Twitter than any other country in the second half of 2014, data published in February by the micro-blogging site showed.
