Indonesian Islamic police stage checkpoints and raids against jeans and tight skirts

Islamic police in Indonesia's Aceh province have been issued with 20,000 long skirts and ordered to cover up women deemed to have broken Muslim dress codes.

The province on Sumatra island has banned Muslim women from wearing figure-hugging clothing such as tight trousers, under Islamic by-laws that have outraged less conservative parts of the mainly Muslim archipelago.

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Vice and virtue officers in West Aceh district have been told that from yesterday they should ask women wearing the wrong clothes to put on the government-issue skirts on the spot.

" I will hand over some 20,000 skirts to the sharia police in West Aceh," West Aceh district chief Ramli Mansur said. "Female offenders can then immediately change their tight pants to the long, loose skirts if the sharia police catch them."