Reuters

Oslo, Jun 22 : Schools in the Norwegian capital will ban Muslim girls from wearing the burqa, adding to the list of European cities and states that have banned the headdress.

Oslo's city council wants to ban the burqa or niqab, which covers the face, because teachers cannot do their job properly without seeing their students' faces, the head of the city's education department Toerger Odegaard said.

''We will introduce a ban after the summer holidays at the end of August,'' he told Reuters yesterday.

Lawyers at the Ministry of Education had just told the council it would not be illegal under Norwegian law to ban the headdress.

France has banned overt religious symbols at school. In December the Dutch parliament voted in favour of banning burqas, and the Belgian town of Maaseik has forbidden them through an existing law which required people to be identifiable in public.

Muslims in Norway --  which has large Pakistani and Somali minorities concentrated mainly in Oslo -  said the move was an encroachment on personal freedom.

''We have been having a discussion about whether you should wear the niqab or not, but making laws which ban it is just going too far,'' said Fakhra Salimi, the head of MiRA a partly state-sponsored group that helps female immigrants in Norway.

She said women over the age of 16 should be able to wear the niqab if they chose.