Dounia and Khouloude, both 12-year-olds of Algerian origin, were told to leave their college (junior secondary school) at Mulhouse after refusing to remove their headcovering since the new law took effect in early September.

Two other girls were expelled by different schools in Mulhouse, and the fifth girl was banned by her school in Caen. The remaining cases are expected to be decided before half-term next week.

At Bobigny, in the northern Paris outskirts, three teenage Sikh boys have appealed to a local court to order their school to allow them to return to classrooms from which they have been excluded for refusing to remove their headcover.

France’s small Sikh community of about 30,000 has been caught up in a law which was primarily aimed at countering rising Islamist radicalism in schools, reflected in the wearing of the hijab, denial of the Holocaust, the intimidation of non-practising Muslims and attacks on Jewish pupils. The boys took off their full turbans and wore a simpler cloth cover to hold their hair, but the school said this still breached the law. Similarly, the two Mulhouse girls had swapped their full headcover for bandanas, but the head teachers deemed these still to breach the law.

François Fillon, the Education Minister, said the introduction of the law had been a success because only 72 pupils in France were refusing to obey it. Teachers had succeeded in changing the minds of the great majority of 620 girls who turned up at their schools with headcovers at the start of the school year, he said. The ministry had earlier delayed action against the girls in order to avoid raising tension while kidnappers in Iraq continued to hold two French journalists.

The pair is still being held by Islamic militants whose original demand, when they seized them in August, was that France abandon the ban on headcovers.

The Government said yesterday it believed that the hostages were still alive and was continuing efforts to contact their captors.

Khouloude told Le Monde: “They have destroyed my life.” Dounia said: “They put us in quarantine. They wouldn’t let us into the playground . . . What they want is for us to wear tight trousers like all the other girls in the school.”

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