Three transgender women were shot dead and dumped by the side of a road outside Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, police confirmed on Monday.

They appear to have been shot at close range, authorities said.

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Two trans women found stabbed to death in their apartment. Three men have already been arrested.

It was the second violent attack on transgender people in a week in Pakistan. Days before, a transgender woman was seriously injured in a knife attack at Karachi’s popular Sea View Beach.

Police said the precise motive behind the murders was unclear, but advocates said both incidents were part of a larger campaign to terrorize the transgender community.

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“These back-to-back tragedies show that the community is being systematically targeted,” Pakistan’s Gender Interactive Alliance said in a statement.

The group demanded immediate arrests, a dedicated police protection unit for transgender people, and greater solidarity from the general public, DW reported.

“This is not just about individual killings,” the group said. “It is an attempt to terrorize and silence an entire community.”

Pakistan passed the progressive Transgender Rights Act in 2018, granting landmark protections to trans people in the Muslim-majority country.

But religious groups have campaigned against it since, calling it “a conspiracy to destroy our family system.” Key provisions of the act were overturned by a Sharia court in 2023.

“When hate speech and campaigns are carried out so openly, outcomes like this are inevitable,” Shahzadi Rai, a trans activist and government-appointed local councilor in Karachi, told AFP.

“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,” the activist said.

On Sunday, trans protesters and allies staged a demonstration outside Karachi’s state-run Jinnah Hospital, where the bodies of the three victims were autopsied. They warned of nationwide demonstrations if the killers were not brought to justice, the Associated Press reported.

“If the police fail to identify the killers, we will announce a countrywide protest,” said transgender rights activist Bindiya Rana, who lamented that violence against trans Pakistanis “is not new; it is deeply embedded in our society.”

Last October, three men were arrested in the brutal stabbing deaths of two transgender women in Mardan, in the country’s conservative northwest, in what police believe was an “honor killing.” The archaic form of punishment is carried out by relatives for perceived sexual transgressions in defiance of Islamic law.

While ordering a probe into the weekend shooting, Murad Ali Shah, chief minister of Pakistan’s southeastern Sindh province, said, “Transgender [people] are an oppressed section of society. We must all give them dignity and respect.”

The three victims were later buried in a local graveyard.

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