Couple caned for kissing on TikTok in Indonesia's conservative Aceh province

Source: Associated Press

Couple caned for kissing on TikTok in Indonesia's conservative Aceh province

Story by REZA SAIFULLAH and EDNA TARIGAN • 20h • 2 min read

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) — A young couple in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province were publicly caned on Thursday after an Islamic Shariah court convicted them of violating Islamic law by kissing during a TikTok livestream.

Aceh’s Sharia court ordered the two people to be whipped with a rattan cane 21 times each for kissing without being married. At least a hundred people witnessed the caning, carried out by a group of people wearing robes and hoods on a stage in Bustanussalatin City Park in Banda Aceh.

The couple, a 22-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman, were arrested in April after a Feb. 27 livestream in which they kissed in a car in Banda Aceh went viral and prompted reports to local Sharia authorities.

Aceh is the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia that enforces a version of Islamic law. Indonesia’s secular central government granted the province the right to implement religious law in 2006 as part of a peace deal to end a separatist war.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/couple-caned-for-kissing-on-tiktok-in-indonesia-s-conservative-aceh-province/ar-AA272HIs