15 people, including five women, and two gay men were punished with public caning Friday for violating Sharia law in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province.
Two men accused of being gay received 87 lashes each for gay sex, while nine others were sentenced up to 26 lashes for adultery. Four people, one of whom is female, were lashed 27 times for being drunk.
In video of the punishment seen by CNN, people can be heard jeering as the detainees, who are wearing white, traditional koko shirts, are brought up to the scaffold in front of the mosque.
Others took cellphone video of the punishment being administered by a hooded man while a voice counts the strokes over a loudspeaker. At one point a uniformed official appears to instruct the masked whipper where to land the blow.
The two men whipped for homosexuality Friday aren’t the first — last May two men were lashed 83 times for the same offense.
Muhammad Hidayat, the Sharia police chief, said that homosexuality was widely reviled in the deeply religious state, and that his police force would carry out the prosecution of violations of Sharia equally, without favoring officials.