A religious school cook in Malaysia was sentenced to six strokes of the cane and a year in jail for drinking alcohol, an official said yesterday, the latest in a series of harsh punishments from an Islamic court judge.
The rulings by Judge Abdul Rahman Mohamad Yunos have focused attention on the increasing enforcement of the stricter punishment prescribed by Islamic laws and raised fears that Malaysia — a traditionally moderate country — may be influenced by radical Islamists.
Consuming alcohol in public is an offense for Malaysian Muslims, who are 60 percent of the country’s 28 million people. Offenders are usually warned or fined, but not in Abdul Rahman’s court, the Shariah High Court in Pahang state.
In the latest case, he sentenced Mohamad Sabri Zulkepli, 24, to jail and six cane strokes on Wednesday.
The cook at a Muslim school pleaded guilty to drinking liquor at a mall in Pahang on Feb. 13, said Mohamad Azhari Abdul Rahman, the court’s chief registrar.
The Star and New Straits Times newspapers quoted the judge as saying that a jail sentence was better than a fine because Mohamad Sabri couldn’t afford to use up his small earnings. He was also quoted as saying that the offender could get “proper guidance” and repent in jail.
“The accused can use the time spent in jail to reflect on how to lead a better life,” the Star quoted him as saying.
Mohamad Sabri — who could have been jailed for up to three years — has been in prison since his arrest in February, and plans to appeal his sentence, said Mohamad Azhari, the court official.
Last year, judge Abdul Rahman sentenced an Indonesian Muslim man to a year in prison and six strokes of the cane for drinking liquor at a restaurant.
But what brought him the most notoriety was the case of Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, a former model and mother of two, who was caught drinking beer at a beach resort restaurant in Pahang last year. She was the first woman to face caning in Malaysia, and the case provoked a widespread uproar among women’s activists, newspaper columnists and liberal Muslims.
Possibly mindful of the negative publicity Malaysia was receiving internationally, the state’s sultan, the titular ruler, commuted Kartika’s sentence earlier this month and asked her to perform three weeks of community service.
However, three other Muslim women were caned in February for having sex out of wedlock.
Malaysia follows a dual track justice system. Muslims are governed by Islamic laws and can be tried only in Shariah courts.
More than a third of the population is non-Muslim, and Islamic laws don’t apply to them, but they also complain that their rights are increasingly under threat, especially in disputes with Muslims. Malaysia set up an interfaith committee to tackle such conversion and other disputes on Tuesday.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS