KARACHI, Dec 22: Two French journalists jailed on charges of violating their visa restrictions began a hunger strike on Monday in protest against their arrest, their lawyer said.

“We are hereby announcing that we are going on hunger strike for an indefinite period. We are professional journalists but we don’t know why we are being treated as criminals,” lawyer Nafees Siddiqui quoted them as saying.

“We will only take water,” he quoted L’Express magazine’s reporter and photographer Marc Epstein and Jean Paul Guilloteau, respectively, as saying.

Mr Siddiqui filed an appeal in the Sindh High Court on Monday.

“I have moved the bail application in the high court, asking for their release on the ground that investigations against them have been completed,” Mr Siddiqui told AFP.

The court has not fixed a date but the appeal could come up for hearing on Tuesday or Wednesday, he added.

Minister for Information and Broadcasting Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said on Monday that the French journalists were involved in tarnishing Pakistan’s image abroad.

In an interview with the Voice of America, he said the two journalists had hired people to act as Taliban in a fake film recovered from them.—Agencies