A Sudanese woman, believed to be around 20, has been sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery, and is being held near Khartoum, shackled in prison with her baby son

Sudan may start applying sharia, or Islamic law, more strictly following the secession of mostly non-Muslim South Sudan in 2011. The woman, Intisar Sharif Abdalla, was sentenced by the Ombada criminal court on April 22, 2012. Abdalla was illiterate and did not have a lawyer or interpreter in the courtroom, although Arabic is not her native language. Arabic is the main language in the overwhelmingly Muslim nation, though a wide range of smaller languages are also spoken, particularly in tribal areas. It was unclear where Abdalla came from. Floggings are a common punishment in Sudan for crimes like drinking alcohol and adultery. Following a 1989 coup, Sudan introduced laws that took sharia as their main source and hosted militants including Osama bin Laden. Sudan still lists death by stoning in its statutes. In 2010, Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir said that the country would adopt a fully Islamic constitution following the secession of the south, agreed under a 2005 peace deal that ended decades of civil war. Most people in South Sudan are Christian or follow traditional African beliefs. In 2010, the case of Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese U.N. official, sparked international furor when she was sentenced to flogging for wearing trousers.