World Bulletin / News Desk

Bulgaria will allow new passports with headscarves for Muslim women, Novinite quoted the police department in the Bulgarian city of Pazardzhik as saying.

The spokesman of the regional police office, Miroslav Stoyanov, was quoted as saying that applications with photos of veiled Muslim women have not been rejected but did not mention the exact number of such documents.

Bulgaria said that the photo must display about 1 cm of the person's hair and their ears.

“The demand of all the applicants have been respected,” he was quoted as saying.

In the end of June, the Mufti Office from the Bulgarian city of Smolyan has demanded that the regional police department allow Muslim women to take their new passport pictures with headscarves on, Novinite said.

According to Islam, women should not show their body parts except their face and hands.

According to Amnesty International, at least 100 Muslims died in his four-month campaign to force them to change their names to Bulgarian, which banned the Turkish language in public. It also banned the wearing of headscarves and other Islamic customs such as circumcision and funeral rights.

Muslims make up about 12 percent of the Balkan country's 7.6 million people and they are native in European Union member-Bulgaria. Most are the descendants of ethnic Turks who arrived during five centuries of Ottoman rule that ended in 1878.