LONDON (AP) — British homewares retailer Habitat apologised yesterday after ads for the store appeared on Twitter tagged with words linked to the Iranian election crisis.

Some Twitter users became angry after the upmarket store's messages turned up in searches for topics such as "Iran" and "Mousavi," the name of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Tags with those terms had been attached to the store's messages on the micro-blogging site. Habitat said in a statement that it "would like to make a very sincere apology to any users who were offended by last week's activity on Twitter".

The posts have been removed. Hashtags — words or phrases prefixed with the number symbol — are used on Twitter to help direct users to tweets about specific topics.