Somalia: Man stoned to death for alleged sexual act with teenage boy
A militant official and a Somali resident say al-Shabab fighters have stoned to death a man for carrying out an alleged sex act on a 13-year-old boy.
Associated Press reports Mogadishu resident, Yusuf Abdi, said the group buried a blindfolded man to his waist last Friday and threw stones at him until he died.
AP said an al-Shabab official claimed a judge sentenced the man to death because he reportedly forced a 13-year-old boy to have sex with him.
Sheikh Ibrahim Ali, a Somali religious leader in Mogadishu, said one strict reading of Islamic law, is that a married man who engages in a homosexual act should be killed.
Meanwhile, a Facebook group called ‘Somali Gay Community’ and other LGBT media outlets published photos on a page said to depict the stoning, though it appears that several of the images were from another incident in 2009.
Under Article 409 of the Somali Penal Code sexual intercourse with a person of the same sex is punishable by imprisonment from three months to three years.
The US Department of State’s 2010 Human Rights Report found that in Somalia “sexual orientation was considered a taboo topic, and there was no public discussion of this issue in any region of the country.”
Somalia has a population of around 10 million inhabitants and most of the population are Muslim.
Sharia law, which can prescribe the death penalty for homosexual acts, plays a key role in the country’s legal system.
Somalia’s constitution stipulates that no law that is inconsistent with the basic tenets of Sharia law can be enacted.
