Turkmenistan - You can tell that a president takes his country’s hygiene matters very seriously when he fires employees over a cockroach.

President of Turkmenistan, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, sacked 30 employees from the main state television channel after a cockroach crawled across the studio table of popular nightly news programme.

According to The Guardian, the large brown insect moved across the entire desk, apparently undetected, during the 9pm news broadcast before disappearing. Officials from Turkmenistan's ministry of culture only discovered the cockroach during the programme the following day.

Before this incident on February 21, Berdymukhamedov had instructed Turkmenistan's minister of culture to revamp the country's TV channel, which is still reminiscent of the Soviet-era. However, the cockroach manage to go undetected because the new ministerial committee assigned to supervise and carry out this task only worked from 9am to 6pm.

The news website Kronika Turkmenistan reported that employees affected by the cut included journalists, directors, camera operators and technical staff.