She was a widow who slept with a married man. What these 8 men did to her as "punishment" is disgusting.

She was a 25-year-old widow who slept with a married man.

It’s not a rare situation, and in Australia it carries no penalty.

But in the northern Indonesian province of Banda Aceh, a woman was horrifically gang-raped by vigilantes — and then sentenced to a caning — when her affair with a married father-of-five was discovered.

The young woman and her 40-year-old lover were accosted by seven men and a 13-year-old boy at the woman’s home last Wednesday night, the Jakarta Globe reports.

The details of the ensuing atrocities are shocking: The men raped her repeatedly; they tied up and beat her male companion; they doused both with buckets of sewage before turning the couple in at the local sharia police office.

Thr pair couple were subsequently sentenced to nine lashes each with a cane under Sharia law, a harsh form of Islamic law which in Indonesia is enforced only in the province of Aceh.

“We want the couple to be caned because they violated the religious bylaw on sexual relations,” local Sharia police head Ibrahim Latif said, adding that the sentence would not be voided on the basis of the woman’s rape.

“They have to be [caned] as a form of justice because the rapists will also be processed, but in a criminal court,” he said.

“Besides, they’ve confessed to having sex on several previous occasions.”

Aceh, which lies the northern tip of the western island of Sumatra, was given permission to enforce Sharia law after 2001, in a bid to end a long-running separatist insurgency.

While special police enforce Sharia law in the province — leaving regular police force to enforces “regular” criminal law — the Aceh legislative council in February approved a bylaw ensuring all that violators of Shariah would be tried under Islamic law, irrespective of their religion.

This is not the first time harsh punishments under the religious legal code has made headlines.

Last year, young mother-of-two Arifa Bibi from Pakistan was stoned to death for owning a mobile phone, while a 15-year-old girl was sentenced to 100 lashes for “fornication” after being raped by her stepfather in the Maldives.

In each instance, human rights organisations have spoken out strongly against the use of harsh Sharia penalties, noting that punishments like stoning and flogging contravene a number of international human rights conventions.

Human Rights Watch has previously urged the Indonesian government to review and reject all provisions relating to the death penalty, stoning, and flogging in provinces including Indonesia.

“Stoning and flogging constitute torture in any circumstances,” said Elaine Pearson of the New York-based human rights watchdog in 2009.

“Imposing these draconian punishments on private, consensual conduct means the government can dictate people’s intimate lives.”

Amnesty International have also slammed the use of stoning as a punishment under Sharia law.

“The penalty of death by stoning violates international human rights standards, including prohibitions on torture and cruel and inhuman punishment,” Amnesty International said in a statement last year.

While Sharia law is largely practiced in the countries of Africa and the Asia-Pacific, Brunei last month controversially became the first of Southeast Asia’s predominantly Muslim countries to impose the harsh Islamic law.