Malaysia's beer-drinking model to be caned: father

A Muslim model who is to be caned for drinking beer is ready to face her punishment, her father said Tuesday after an appeals court upheld the controversial sentence.

Muslim model Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno (right) is greeted by her five-year-old daughter Kaitlynn at her father's home in Karai, near Kuala Lumpur. The model, who is to be caned for drinking beer, is ready to face her punishment her father has said after an appeals court upheld the controversial sentence.

Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, 32, was sentenced to six strokes by a religious court last month, making her the first woman to be caned under Islamic law in Malaysia, a moderate Muslim-majority country.

The religious court agreed to review the case after an avalanche of criticism, including calls from the government that the woman's sentence was "too harsh".

State media announced Monday that an appeals panel had upheld the decision.

"We accept the caning sentence. Kartika is ready to be caned. She has been reading the Koran to give her strength," said her 60-year-old father Shukarno Mutalib.

"We want to cooperate with the religious authorities. But do it correctly and not the Taliban way," he said, referring to plans to carry out the punishment with only a light cane.

Shukarno said that religious authorities in central Pahang state, where Kartika was caught drinking beer in a hotel nightclub, have not yet contacted the family regarding the fresh order.

Kartika won a surprise reprieve in late August when she was detained and then abruptly released by religious officials who had planned to take her to a jail outside the capital Kuala Lumpur where she would be caned.

Announcing the review, the government said the sentence could damage the reputation of Malaysia, a multicultural nation which is also home to large ethnic Chinese and Indian communities.

However, the appeals panel of the Sharia High Court in Kuantan on Malaysia's east coast upheld the sentence. It said that a date for the caning, which was postponed until after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has not been set.

"I found that the High Court judge had acted accordingly within his jurisdiction," said Abdul Hamid Abdul Rahman, the chief religious judge of Pahang state, according to the Star newspaper.

"As such, the decision stays," he reportedly said.

Kartika, a part-time model and mother-of-two, has stared down religious authorities by refusing to appeal against her sentence, and challenging them to cane her in public.

Alcohol is widely available in Malaysia but is forbidden for Muslim Malays, who make up 60 percent of the population. They can be fined, caned, or jailed for up to three years but prosecutions are extremely rare.

Malaysia has a dual-track legal system and Islamic courts can try Muslims for religious and moral offences.

Islamic scholars, who have mostly backed the sentence, said the punishment would be carried out when Kartika was fully clothed and with a cane that is smaller and lighter than the heavy length of rattan used in criminal cases.