A 43-year-old man was arrested in the north on Sunday after killing a cat and sharing a grotesque picture of the cat he had just killed to his social media.

The man had posted the picture of a severely maimed dead cat to his social media on Friday and faced fierce backlash from the public. He said the cat had been “harming newborn lambs in his sheep pen”.

On Sunday, the Turkish Cypriot police released a statement saying “after brutally killing a cat caught in a device he had prepared for foxes, he took a photograph of it and published it on his social media account. He was identified and arrested.”

They say their investigation into the matter is ongoing.