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CHAMPAIGN Two editors at the University of Illinois student-run newspaper were suspended Tuesday for their decision to run a series of cartoons that have sparked outrage and violence around the Islamic world.

Editor-in-chief Acton H. Gorton said the Daily Illini's publisher suspended him and the newspaper's opinions sections editor, Charles Prochaska, for two weeks pending the outcome of an internal investigation.

"I'm very disappointed. I think this is nothing more than a cover-up," Gorton said.

Publisher and general manager Mary Cory released a statement Tuesday night saying a student task force will "investigate the internal decision-making and communication surrounding the publishing" of the cartoons.

The paper's editorial staff told readers in Monday's editions that the decision to run the cartoons was made by Gorton and Prochaska without their knowledge. While the staff apologized to the Muslim community, it stopped short of saying it disagreed with the decision.

"We want to make it clear that while we do not necessarily disagree with the decision to print these cartoons, we disagree with how they were run," the editorial reads.

According to the editorial, Gorton and Prochaska ran the cartoons without consulting the staff or the publisher.

"The board and publisher reaffirm that final decisions about content in The Daily Illini rest with the editor-in-chief," Cory said Tuesday. "But ... journalistic norms regarding professional behavior dictate that it is the editor's obligation to engage other student editors and student staff members in rigorous discussion and debate of sensitive content."

Gorton and Prochaska ran their own editorial Monday, defending their decision to reprint the cartoons, and even called "irresponsible" the decision by major newspapers around the country not to publish the cartoons.

Gorton said on Tuesday that other editors were in the same room when the cartoons were laid out on the newspaper's pages and did not object.

The Daily Illini, which is independent of the university, ran six of the 12 cartoons first published in September in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten. In the Daily Illini's Feb. 9 edition, it led with the cartoon that has caused the greatest furor: a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb as part of his turban.