The Islamic Vice Police in Aceh....

Is this going to spread throughout Indonesia???

The young couple are totally busted. They huddle at a beach-side park, near signs forbidding teens from sitting too close. He has his arm around her shoulder. She isn't wearing her jilbabjilbab, the traditional Islamic head scarf.

Just like that, the morality cops are in their face.

"You two aren't married, right?" asks Syafruddin, the rail-thin leader of the six-man patrol, standing stiffly, one hand behind his back. "So you shouldn't sit next to one another."

He separates the two and confiscates their IDs. Later, he says, the team will open an investigation of the couple, especially because the young man had lied, at first insisting the girl was his sister.

"We want to see how far this relationship has progressed," says Syafruddin, who goes by one name. "What they were doing could have led to something sexual."

The team is known as "the vice and virtue patrol," on the beat in Aceh, the only province in the world's most populous Muslim nation to employ Sharia, or Islamic law, for its criminal code. The laws were introduced in 2002 after the Indonesian region was granted autonomy as part of efforts to end a decades-long guerrilla war.

The Sharia police consider themselves the community's public conscience. And on their weekly patrol, they take seriously their role of enforcing the religious strictures.

Now their mission may become deadly serious.

In September, Aceh's provincial parliament passed a law saying married people who commit adultery can be sentenced to death by stoning. It also toughened laws on public caning, adding more lashes for gays, pedophiles and gamblers.

The new law, which still requires the approval of the provincial governor, has outraged human rights groups here, who say the code unfairly targets women and violates international treaties.

They say the law cuts even deeper into private lives. Under the guidelines, the Sharia police could even raid hotel rooms in search of violators, develop informants and work undercover.