"They both died right away and even asked for this application"

The young pair were publicly executed in the remote town of Aguelhok, near the vast West African nation’s northern border with Algeria, on Sunday, a spokesman for the Ansar Dine (‘defenders of the faith’) group said.

‘These two people were married and had extra-conjugal relations.

‘Our men on the ground in Aguelhok applied sharia [Islamic law],’ Sanda Ould Bounama said on Monday.