The pro-Moscow Chechen government has started to demand that female state workers wear headscarves, women in the turbulent Muslim region said on Friday. "I received a verbal warning that if I did not wear a headscarf, I would lose my job. I had to wear it the next day so as not to bring trouble on my head," said one woman who works in the regional administration and asked not to be named. A spokesman for the region's new prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, who has pushed through a series of Islamic decrees, denied the headscarves were compulsory and said women were merely encouraged to cover their hair. But women used to the rough tactics of Kadyrov's government, which is accused of mass abduction and torture in its hunt for separatist rebels, took the suggestion as law.