ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's Foreign Office on Sunday said recent Indian media reports on the alleged deportations of Pakistani nationals from France are fake.

Indian new agency Asian News International (ANI) on Sunday morning reported that over 100 Pakistani citizens have been deported from France in relation to Prime Minister Imran Khan's recent criticism of French President Emmanuel Macron. The ANI news post was later carried by several Indian outlets and made the rounds on social media.

“We have noticed some fake news with regard to the Pakistani diaspora in France being spread by some sections of Indian media and dummy Twitter accounts,” Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said in a statement.

"The baseless and misleading information is patently a handiwork of Indian anti-Pakistan propaganda machine working overtime," he said.

The misleading Indian media reports suggested that Pakistanis in France are facing a backlash following PM Khan's accusation last week that Macron was "attacking Islam," after the European leader defended the publication of cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad.

Chaudhri said, however, that there have been "no complaints" from the Pakistani diaspora in France, whose members are "law abiding and contributing positively to the French economy."

The Pakistani prime minister's special assistant for overseas Pakistanis, Sayed Zulfikar Bukhari also confirmed to Arab News that his ministry had not received any complaints.

“There are over 110,000 Pakistanis who are living in France and we have not received any complaint from them recently,” Bukhari said.