Within days of lifting its 30-month ban on Google’s popular video-sharing site YouTube, Turkey Tuesday blocked access to the site again; with visitors to the site encountering a blank screen with a message that the site was blocked as part of a May 2008 court order.

While that order had required YouTube to remove videos deemed offensive to the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; the state-owned Anatolia news agency Tuesday reported that the new ban followed the posting of videos that featured ex-opposition leader Deniz Baykal.

According to the Anatolia report, a Turkish court in Ankara ordered the recent closure of YouTube – which was still accessible from Turkey as of 9 p. m. local time on Tuesday - because of the contentious video showing Baykal, who stepped down as the leader of the Republican People’s Party in May after a secretly-filmed video posted on the Internet showed him in a bedroom with a woman lawmaker.

Anatolia further reported that the court had asked Turkey’s telecommunications regulator to instruct YouTube to take down the video showing Baykal; and block access to the site if YouTube failed to act in accordance with the instructions.

Though the Istanbul-based Hurriyet Daily News has reported that 4,000 other websites remain banned in Turkey; Turkish visitors to the YouTube site, nonetheless, have been able to get around the ban with the help of the so-called proxy websites.