New York, June 19 (IBNS) Popular search engine Google has said it has removed 640 YouTube videos which allegedly promoted terrorism.

The videos were removed in the second half of 2011 after UK's Association of Chief Police Officers filed complaints on the issue.

Google said it has also terminated five accounts that were linked to the suspected videos.

The company said it received 461 court orders on 6,989 videos between July and December 2011.

However, Google said it took into consideration 68% of the orders.

There were also 546 informal requests on 4,925 videos. Google complied with 43% of the cases, the company said.

"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect - Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Google's senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou was quoted as saying by BBC News.

"For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors," she said.

"In Poland, we received a request from the Agency for Enterprise Development to remove links to a site that criticised it. We didn't comply with either of these requests," Chou told BBC News.