Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night TV show has been “pulled indefinitely” over his claims that Charlie Kirk’s killer was part of a so-called “Maga gang”.

Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which had run for 22 years, had sparked outrage on Monday after Mr Kimmel attacked Republicans for speculating about suspect Tyler Robinson’s motivations behind his alleged crime.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang trying to characterise this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them,” the veteran host said.

But on Wednesday, Nexstar Media Group – which runs some 200 TV stations across America – labelled Mr Kimmel’s comments “offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse”.

Andrew Alford, the president of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, said: “We do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located.

“Continuing to give Mr Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”

A spokesman for ABC went on to confirm the show’s broadcast would be “pre-empted indefinitely”.

Mr Kimmel had also mocked Donald Trump’s response to Mr Kirk’s killing, and laid into the White House for flying US flags at half-mast.

“This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, OK?” he crowed.

But his remarks came just a day after the FBI Utah Governor Spencer Cox confirmed that murder suspect Mr Robinson held a “leftist ideology”.

Inscriptions on bullets found at the crime scene included messages like: “Hey fascist! CATCH!”

While Mr Robinson was raised by religious parents in a deeply conservative region of the state, “his ideology was very different than his family,” Governor Cox told NBC News just days ago.

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC – America’s Ofcom equivalent – had branded Mr Kimmel’s comments “some of the sickest conduct possible”.

Mr Carr told podcaster Benny Johnson that firms like Disney, which owns ABC, and Comcast, which owns NBC must either take action or risk a full-scale federal probe into violations of the FCC’s public interest guidelines.

“I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney, and say: ‘We are going to preempt… We are not going to run Kimmel any more until you straighten this out.’

“It’s time for them to step up and say this garbage – to the extent that that’s what comes down the pipe in the future – isn’t something that serves the needs of our local communities.”

More to follow…