West Midlands Ambulance Service twitter account hacked

The West Midlands Ambulance Service account was among accounts including a Japanese Justin Bieber profile and Forbes to be used to spread messages containing Nazi symbolism.

Some of the accounts affected were branded with the Turkish flag and had messages being sent out in Turkish.

One of the tweets, including the one sent on the WMAS account, appeared to display a swastika. According to reports, there were also two hashtags, which translated mean Nazi Germany and Nazi Holland.

The tweet appears to be in favour of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Many of the accounts are believed to use a third party online statistics package based in the Netherlands, and there has been rising tensions between Turkey and the Dutch government.

Murray MacGregor, spokesman for the trust, said: “We use an online statistics package and it looks like they have been hacked.

“It appears to be to do with the issues between the Turkish and Dutch governments and the package is based in Holland.

“Everybody from Justin Bieber’s Japanese account to us has been affected. It is not that we were hacked, but we were one of thousands.

“The content was very distressing and we deleted it within 10 minutes once we were aware of it.

“We would like to thank the members of the public who made us aware of it and we have taken the necessary steps to change our passwords and settings just in case.”

Last week Erdogan branded the Dutch government "Nazi remnants and fascists".

In addition, a Turkish minister was barred from visiting his country’s consulate in Rotterdam, prompting Erdogan to respond by warning the Netherlands it would “pay the price” for its actions.

The war of words continued on Tuesday when Dutch Prime MinisterMark Rutte told CNBC that Erdogan was "totally off the mark" when hecompared the Dutch to Nazis and had behaved in an "increasingly hysterical" manner.