Turkey has blocked a Google service that was being used by Turks to circumvent a similar ban on Twitter as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government tries to stem the spreading of leaks from a corruption probe before local elections, Bloomberg reported on Saturday quoting the Hurriyet newspaper.

The government prevented access to Google DNS on Saturday, the Hurriyet and Haberturk newspapers said. DNS was created in the 1980s to help computers find websites using words instead of numbers. Turks started using the service on Friday to access Twitter after the government blocked the social networking site. Bloomberg's calls to Erdogan's office and the Turkish telecom watchdog went unanswered.

Later in the day, Erdogan's office issued a statement claiming that the ban on Twitter was aimed at preventing "character assassination". "Twitter has been used as a means to carry out systematic character assassinations by circulating illegally acquired recordings, fake and fabricated records of wiretapping," said the statement sent to AFP in English. It also claimed international precedents, including Germany's decision to ban a neo-Nazi Twitter account in October.