Rolling Stone has released a controversial cover of Boston Marathon bomber suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for their August issue.

The publication was hit by a firewall of criticism, anger, and protests for what many said was glorifying the accused killer as a "celebrity and rock star," according to USA Today.

Many Boston area readers slammed the cover on the magazine's Facebook page, and Walgreens is refusing to sell copies of the issue, which goes on sale this Friday.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino was highly upset by what he referred to as "rewarding a terrorist with celebrity treatment," according to the Boston Herald. He wrote a letter stating his fury with RS, the Herald reported.

"[Your cover] is ill-conceived, at best, and re-affirms a terrible message that destruction gains fame for killers and their 'causes,'" the mayor wrote in an official letter to the magazine's publisher Jann Wenner on Wednesday that has circulated on Twitter. "There may be valuable journalism behind your sensational treatment, though we can't know because almost all you released is the cover. To respond to you in anger is to feed into your obvious marketing strategy."

He continued to say that the focus should be on the brave survivors, and thousands of people who came to their side and rescue. "The survivors of the Boston attacks deserve Rolling Stone cover stories, though I no longer feel that Rolling Stone deserves them," he said.

The magazine's editors defended the story titled "The Bomber" by contributing editor Janet Reitman.

The RS editors wrote a brief statement in the introduction to the cover story saying, "Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone's long-stanging commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day."

The statement went on to say, "The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens."

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