Topless Kate: Swedish mag publishes pics despite ban

A Swedish celebrity gossip magazine published topless photographs of the wife of Britain's Prince William, the former Kate Middleton, on Wednesday and a Danish sister journal is to follow suit on Thursday.

The pictures were published despite a decision by a French court on Tuesday to ban gossip magazine Closer from further publishing the photographs and ordering it to hand the pictures over to the royal couple.

The injunction granted to the Duke and the Duchess of Cambridge, as the couple are formally known, also prevents Closer from selling the pictures to other media.

But Carina Lofkvist said her magazine, 'Se och Hor' (See and Hear), had bought the pictures on Friday. The magazine published 11 pictures of the royal couple on holiday, of which four show the duchess topless.

"They are very cute pictures of a loving relationship," Lofkvist told Reuters.

She said the magazine decided to publish the pictures because they were not in any way obscene and it had in the past published similar pictures of celebrities.

The pictures were taken while the couple were on holiday in a chateau in southern France and show the duchess slipping off her bikini top, relaxing on a sun lounger and at one point pulling down the back of her bikini bottoms.

Buckingham Palace has called the photo spread a "grotesque" invasion of the couple's privacy.

Lofkvist said the couple had to be aware they could be photographed if they showed themselves in a place open to public view, adding the fact these pictures were of a royal couple was also neither here nor there.

The Danish equivalent of her magazine, "Se og Hor", owned by the same Danish media company, are to publish pictures of the duchess on Thursday.

"It is in the DNA of 'Se og Hor' that we shall entertain and satisfy our readers' curiosity," editor-in-chief Kim Henningsen said in a statement on the weekly's website.

Neither the Swedish nor Danish magazine are to publish the pictures electronically.

On Monday, the publisher of tabloid The Irish Daily Star suspended its editor after the newspaper broke ranks with Irish and British peers, publishing pages from Closer with the photographs in its Saturday edition.

Italian gossip magazine Chi, also published by Closer's owner Mondadori, printed a 26-page special edition dedicated to the pictures on Monday.