The bodies of three trans women have been found dumped on the side of the road in Karachi, Pakistan.

The gruesome find was made in the Memon Goth area of the city, the largest in Pakistan, on Sunday (21 September). Police spokesman Javed Ahmed Abro told the AFP news agency that the bodies were “bullet-riddled”. All three victims were shot at close range.

Syed Murad Ali Shah, the provincial chief minister for Sindh, the province in which Karachi is located, said: “Transgender persons are a vulnerable segment of society and we must all give them dignity and respect.”

Meanwhile, activists in the region described the deaths as an attempt to “silence” trans voices.

Trans rights campaigner Bindiya Rana told The Associated Press that violence aimed at trans people in Pakistan “is not new and it is deeply embedded in our society”, adding: “If the police fail to identify the killers, we will announce a countrywide protest.”

Fellow activist and Karachi councillor Shahzadi Rai said: “When hate speech and campaigns are carried out so openly, outcomes like this are inevitable. Even though the state and police are on our side, killings are still occurring, which indicates that deep-rooted hatred against transgender people persists in our society.”

According to the BBC, a report in the medical journal The Lancet in 2023 claimed that 90 per cent of transgender people in Pakistan have faced physical assaults.

A spokesperson for rights group Gender Interactive Alliance identified the women as “khawaja sira persons”, a term referring to the third-gender community in Pakistan, and cited an attack just days earlier.

“These back-to-back tragedies show that the khawaja sira community is being systematically targeted. This is not just about individual killings, it’s an attempt to terrorise and silence an entire community,” they said.

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Gender Interactive Alliance set out a series of demands, including calling on the police to conduct “immediate, transparent investigations and arrest all perpetrators”, the introduction of a specific protection unit for trans people, and new legislation to combat hate crime.

“The khawaja sira community will not remain silent, our lives are as valuable as every other citizens’,” the spokesperson added. “We demand justice. We demand protection.”

Despite being able to self-identify under the 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, the transgender community continues to face discrimination, abuse and harassment in the South Asian country.

Two trans women living in Mardan, a city about 30 miles east of Peshawar, were killed in their home in 2024, and a year earlier, Marvia Malik, the country’s first trans newsreader, survived an assassination attempt when two gunmen opened fire while she was at home.