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A Conservative councillor who called for a newspaper columnist to be stoned to death was arrested over a message on his private Twitter account, police said today.

Gareth Compton conservative councillor for Erdington, Birmingham, was questioned and released on bail following his arrest.

A West Midlands Police spokesperson said: “We can confirm a 38-year-old man from Harborne has been arrested for an offence under section 127 (1a) of the Communications Act of 2003 on suspicion of sending an offensive or indecent message. He has been bailed pending further inquiries.”

The post on Mr Compton’s twitter profile, which has since been removed, reportedly read: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”

In a message posted on the site this afternoon he apologised: “I did not ‘call’ for the stoning of anybody. I made an ill-conceived attempt at humour in response to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown saying on Radio 5 Live … that no politician had the right to comment on human rights abuses, even the stoning of women in Iran. I apologise for any offence caused. It was wholly unintentional.”

The Conservative Party said Mr Compton had been suspended indefinitely over the alleged tweet.

A Conservative spokesman said: “Language of this sort is not acceptable and as a result Gareth Compton’s membership of the Conservative Party has been indefinitely suspended pending further investigation.”

“As a matter of course Cllr Compton has been suspended from the Conservative group.”

In September Apple’s, chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled their new music-focused social network Ping descrtibing it as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes.”

On Thursday Twitter and Ping got together but Facebook and Ping have yet to come to an arrangement. Despite months of negotiations between the technology titans an expected Ping integration with Facebook has never materialized.

Twitter announced that the integration with Ping will allow users who link their accounts to share previews of their favorite tunes with their followers on the micro-blogging service.

Ping enables users to view photos and videos of their favorite musicians, receive information about concert dates and connect with other users to discuss albums and songs and make musical recommendations. The iTunes song previews would be available on Twitter in the 23 countries where the iTunes Store offers music.

The Twitter tie-up with Apple will put Ping activity, song previews and links to purchase music from the iTunes Store into the Twitter messages known as “tweets.”

Linking Twitter and Ping accounts identifies fellow Ping users among a Twitter user’s group of followers.

According to an official Twitter blog post “Once you’ve linked the accounts, whenever you Post, Like, Review, or tell your friends why you purchased a song or album on Ping, this activity will also be tweeted to your Twitter followers,”

“When you click on a tweet that’s sent via Ping or that contains an iTunes link, you’ll see the song or album in Twitter’s details pane, with the ability to listen to song previews from iTunes, making the experience even richer.”

More than one million people joined Ping in the 48 hours following its launch in early September.

Twitter allows users to fire off messages of 140 characters or less, has enjoyed skyrocketing popularity since it was launched in 2006 by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone and now has over 160 million users.