Nassim Mimoune, a French Muslim man who punched a nurse for trying to remove his wife’s burqa during childbirth, has been jailed in southern France.

Nassim Mimoune, 24, had already been expelled from the delivery room for branding the nurse a “rapist” as she carried out an intimate examination of his wife.

Then through a window Nassim Mimoune spotted the midwife taking off his wife’s burqa as she prepared to give birth.

The man smashed opens the locked door and hit the woman in the face, demanding she replace the full Islamic face veil.

As his wife delivered a baby boy, Nassim Mimoune was ejected from the building by security men from the hospital in Marseille and arrested for assault.

A judge in the southern French port jailed Nassim Mimoune for six months on Wednesday, telling him: “Your religious values are not superior to the laws of the republic.”