Indonesian man collapses during flogging for child rape

EAST ACEH, Indonesia: An Indonesian man collapsed as he was flogged nearly 150 times on Thursday for raping a child in Aceh province, where public whipping is a common punishment for violating Islamic law.

The 19-year-old grimaced and cried out as a masked sharia officer lashed his back with a rattan stick in the town of Idi. He pleaded for the punishment to stop and was briefly treated by doctors before the flogging restarted.

The man was arrested earlier this year on charges he molested and raped the victim, whose age was not revealed. He was sentenced to 146 lashes, a particularly high number reserved for the most serious crimes.

"The maximum sentence is meant to be a deterrent," Ivan Nanjjar Alavi, an official from the East Aceh prosecutor’s office, told reporters. Aceh, on the western tip of Sumatra, is the only region in Muslim-majority Indonesia to impose Islamic law under an autonomy deal with the central government that ended a long-running separatist insurgency.