Officer photographed gassing protester gets unusual punishment

ANKARA, Turkey -- Media reports say a court has ordered a policeman who was photographed spraying tear gas from close range at a woman wearing a red dress during Turkey's 2013 anti-government protests to plant 600 trees as punishment.

The protests grew out of anger against government plans to uproot trees at Istanbul's central Gezi park. The woman in red, captured in the photograph with her hair up in the air from the force of the spray, quickly became one of the protest's symbols.

Hurriyet Daily News said Thursday that the Istanbul court initially sentenced the policeman to 20 months in prison for exceeding his powers, malpractice and causing injury. It later suspended the sentence and ordered him instead to plant the trees and care for them for six months.

The image became a symbol for Turkish protesters: a well-dressed woman, unarmed, protesting the destruction of a park.

"It symbolizes taking a stance, resisting, standing for what you believe in," Derin Ozsezen, a Turkish-American artist, told CBS News in 2013. "I also think that the fact it is a woman in such a male-dominated country is very empowering."

After the incident, many Twitter and Facebook users changed their profile pictures to a drawing depicting the woman as bigger than the police.