Charlie Hebdo slammed for Italy earthquake cartoon

Satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo was slammed on social media for a cartoon depicting victims of the recent central Italy earthquake as pasta dishes.

The latest edition of the French publication features a cartoon entitled "Earthquake, Italian-style", which depicts victims of last week's 6.2-magnitude quake with varying degrees of injury, each likened to an Italian recipe, CNN reported.

A severely bleeding man is labelled "penne with tomato sauce".

A woman with a badly bruised or burned face is "penne au gratin" and a pile of victims pancaked beneath a collapsed building, their legs sticking out from the bloodied rubble, is "lasagna".

Sergio Pirozzi, the mayor of devastated Amatrice, a town whose reputation for its renowned all'amatriciana pasta sauce recipe was referenced in the cartoon, deemed it an "unpleasant and embarrassing satire", CNN noted.

"I'm sure it doesn't correspond to the real sentiment of the French people," Italian national news agency ANSA quoted the mayor as saying. "Irony is always welcome, but you can't satirise disasters and the dead," he said.

More than 180 people were killed in Amatrice, and much of the town was levelled.

The hashtag #CharlieHebdo was soon trending on Twitter, with many expressing disgust at the cartoon for ridiculing the victims of the quake, which killed nearly 300 people and left many villages in ruins.

"They hide themselves behind 'satire'. Leave your office, come here and stand in front of those people who've lost everything," wrote one Twitter user.

"This is not satire anymore, this is pure disrespect for those who lost their lives, I'm disgusted," wrote another Twitter user.

In 2015, the magazine came under heavy criticism when it published a controversial cartoon of the young Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi who drowned while fleeing Syria, CNN added.