The management of the Khyber Medical College (KMC) morgue in Peshawar has refused to keep the body of a transgender person who was found murdered in the Darmangi area on Saturday.
They [management] have told us that the body is too decomposed and it would make their freezers dirty,” transgender rights activist Qamar Naseem told The Express Tribune.
“Not only that, the government contractor has also refused to bury the body,” he added.
“It’s extremely shameful the way a human’s body is being treated.”
Two transgender Pakistanis tortured to death in Saudi Arabia
The activist said the body was now being handed over to the Edhi Foundation for burial.
“We had asked the morgue’s management to keep the body for just one night and they even refused to do that,” Naseem maintained.
The morgue at the KMC is the only such facility in the entire province.
The body of Arif alias Wara was found in the Ashiqabad area earlier in the day.
A police official told The Express Tribune that there were torture marks on the body and the throat was slit. The body was sent to the KMC for an autopsy.
Tamure Kamal, a rights activist, hit out at the police and government for their failure to provide protection to the transgender community.
Only 1,456 transgender listed in electoral rolls
“This is the 53rd transgender person killed since 2015 and we have around 300 cases of violence against transgender persons on record including rape, gang rape, kidnapping and torture,” he said, adding that the violence against transgender people was far from over and it was because the police was not taking the issue seriously.
There are only 1,456 transgender voters on the country’s electoral rolls featuring 97.02 million people, although their population according to the latest census is over 10,000.
The rolls updated till October 12 have 54.59 million male and 42.42 million female voters. According to officials of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), only 1,456 persons mentioned themselves as transgender in their CNIC and were registered as voters in the category.
The community and some transgender organisations claim that their number is in hundreds of thousands and it is generally believed that their population is much higher than that shown in the electoral rolls.
