Two lifetime Bulgarian prisoners have stitched their lips and declared a hunger strike demanding cable television and other perks, officials said in Thursday.

Prison director Vesselin Kotzev told AFP that he was trying to persuade the prisoner, who has removed his stitches to give an interview, that "stitching his mouth again is not the way to put in his demands, which anyway are unrealistic as they are forbidden by law."

The prisoner has not put back his stitches yet.

The two men and a third prisoner who has joined them in the hunger strike are serving life sentences for murder in the southern town of Pazardzhik.

According to Kotzev, the prisoners are demanding that prison authorities give them coffee, tea, cigarettes and cable television but also that their cells be thrown open during the day and the electricity left on at night.

But Kotzev said that the prisoners, who are under medical surveillance, "have four or five hours a day outside their cells."

The two prisoners who sewed their mouths shut, leaving small openings so they can still smoke cigarettes, have warned that all 15 prisoners in confinement at the Pazardzhik jail were ready to stitch up their lips.

According to AFP, the overcrowded conditions in Bulgarian jails have long been criticized by Bulgarian and international human rights groups.