Six couples were publicly whipped in Indonesia's conservative Aceh province Monday, Mar. 4, for relations outside marriage. The twelve people whipped were arrested late last year during a raid on a hotel in the province's capital Banda Aceh.
Rights groups have slammed 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 mostly Muslim population -- around
98 percent of its five million residents practice Islam. 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. (AFP)
