|TOP|China has taken the unprecedented decision to pull The Da Vinci Code from all cinemas across the country just weeks after it opened with a glittering premiere in Beijing.

The Times quotes an official at the New Century Cinema in Beijing as saying that he had been ordered to stop running the film from Friday onwards.

“We were told it’s due to special reasons. If you want to watch it you had better come today,” he said.

Meanwhile film company executives said they had been told to pull the film in order to make space for more Chinese films to show in cinemas although this did not prevent the release of another major foreign blockbuster Friday, Ice Age: The Meltdown.

|AD|Rumours are circulating that the withdrawal of the film follows protests from religious groups. The state-controlled China Catholic Patriotic Association has already urged its members to boycott the film because of its controversial claims on the Christian faith.

"The movie has many details that go against the Catholic teachings or are even insulting," Liu Bainian, vice-president of the China Patriotic Catholic Association, told Xinhua news agency in an interview last month.

A cinema clerk in Beijing said: “We received a notice from the Beijing Government asking us to stop the film. It might be something to do with the religious content.”

The Da Vinci Code has also been pulled in several states in India following protests from Christian communities.

The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu became the fourth state in India earlier in the month to ban the Ron Howard film adaptation of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel. It followed bans already in place in the states of Punjab, Goa and the predominantly Christian Nagaland.

The film was also withdrawn from cinemas across Pakistan and Fiji. Officials in Pakistan said the ban was because of the blasphemous religious content of the film.