Young couple in Indonesia whipped for cuddling publicly

A young couple in Indonesia’s Aceh province was whipped on Thursday after they were caught cuddling in public – a crime under the conservative region’s Islamic law.

Hundreds of spectators watched as an 18-year-old university student and her boyfriend, also 18, were whipped 17 times each outside a mosque in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital.

Flogging is used as punishment for a range of offenses in the region at the tip of Sumatra island, including gambling, drinking alcohol, and having gay sex or relations outside of marriage.

A 35-year-old man was also flogged with a rattan cane for being intimate with a woman, aged 40, in a local grocery store.

All four had served several months in prison before the punishment.

On Thursday, the 40-year-old woman pleaded to be caned in an apparent attempt to get out of jail immediately, but a medical team postponed her flogging after they deemed her physically unfit.

Aceh is the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia that imposes Islamic law.

“People outside of Aceh who think Islamic sharia (law) is cruel can now see that it is actually very tolerant and humane,” said Banda Aceh deputy mayor Zainal Arifin.

In December, two men caught having sex with underage girls were whipped 100 times each.

Rights groups condemn public caning as cruel, and Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has called for it to end.

But the practice has wide support among Aceh’s population, where around 98 percent of its five million residents practice Islam.

Earlier this year, Aceh said flogging would be carried out behind prison walls in future, but some local governments have continued public whippings.

Aceh adopted religious law after it was granted special autonomy in 2001, an attempt by the central government to quell a long-running separatist insurgency.