Five Indonesian men were publicly caned Friday for gambling in Indonesia’s staunchly Islamic Aceh province, a prosecutor said. The men faced a local court in Langsa city in the morning for their involvement in a local lottery and were given six lashes of the cane. “All five were caned because they broke sharia laws against gambling,” prosecutor Putra Masduri told AFP. The men were caned in a public field where hundreds of locals looked on and cheered, some yelling, “Give him more, why just six?”.
Twenty men were arrested in January when police discovered the lottery but only the five turned up to court, refusing a lawyer, Masduri said. Three of the men were found to have bought lottery tickets, while the other two were involved in organising and selling them. Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra island, adopted partial sharia law in 2001 as part of an autonomy package aimed at quelling separatist sentiment.