invalid path / no access

I'm using faceted search which creates paths of this kind:

publications/results/taxonomy:153

When creating a menu item with this path I get this error message:

The path '/results/taxonomy:153' is either invalid or you do not have access to it.

(Note that it has also stripped the first path component "publications".)
The same happens when I create an alias (which was sort of expected).

Is this because of the colon? Is there a security checks which causes this and could it be modified to allow for colons?