When people from the Hijra community die, who keeps track of these deaths?

When members of Chattogram’s Hijra community went looking for Moushumi on Saturday morning, they found the 52-year-old guruma lying dead inside the home where she lived alone.

There was blood around her mouth. Police found marks on her neck. Her tongue was partly protruding. Investigators suspected strangulation. CCTV footage showed an unfamiliar man entering and leaving her home that night.

Then came the things that were missing.

According to information gathered in the investigation, a gold chain, two mobile phones and four lakh taka in cash could not be found. Police initially examined whether robbery was a motive. Moushumi’s father, Rustam Ali, filed a murder case with Khulshi Police Station later that night.

Two days later, police made an arrest.

Md Momin, alias Sheikh Rony, 34, was arrested from Chattogram’s Pahartali area on Monday afternoon. Police said CCTV footage from the area helped investigators identify him and that he admitted during preliminary questioning to killing Moushumi.

Moushumi, whose official name was Mohammad Mohsin, had long been known as a guruma, or community leader, among a section of Chattogram’s Hijra population. Her death travelled quickly through a community accustomed to learning about its dead through informal networks… a telephone call, a Facebook post, a WhatsApp message from another Hijra group.

There is simply nowhere else to look.

Bangladesh does not maintain a central repository showing how many Hijra people die each year, how they die or how many are victims of homicide, Daily Waadaa found after speaking with community members and officials. There is no consolidated count separating murder from suicide, accident, disease or natural causes.

Md Shahjahan, deputy director of the Department of Social Services of the government, confirmed that his agency does not keep such a record.

“The list of Hijras is maintained by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. We obtain the data from there and work with it,” Shahjahan told Waadaa. “There is no separate category for Hijras; they are all classified as members of disadvantaged communities.”

The department provides allowances, training and education stipends to members of the community, he said. But its administrative role does not extend to tracking their deaths.

“If a Hijra dies under natural or unnatural circumstances, the matter is handled by respective and relevant authorities," Shahjahan said. “We do not maintain a list of such deaths.”

Two relevant officials from the BBS who were contacted didn’t want to comment on the issue. “Why would we keep track of deaths of Hijras? This is not our job,” said one official.

The absence is notable because the legal position of Hijra people has changed considerably over the past decade. The government formally recognised Hijras as a separate gender category in 2013, and they subsequently gained the ability to register and vote under that identity.

Before that recognition, there was little institutional trace of Hijra deaths as a distinct category. More than a decade after recognition and the extension of electoral and other rights, there is still no systematic record of how members of the community are dying.

How many ‘Moushumis’ have there been?

A review by Waadaa of Bangladeshi news reports and documentation by rights groups found at least 17 Hijra or transgender people reported killed in Bangladesh since 2020. 

At least two other deaths, including Moushumi’s, were initially reported as suspicious or possible killings without a conclusive determination available in the records reviewed.

The figure found by Waadaa should not be mistaken for a national death toll. It is something more limited and, in another way, more revealing…a minimum assembled from deaths that happened to become visible.

Most appeared briefly in local news reports. Rights groups subsequently gathered some of the cases into annual reports. There is no way of knowing from the available records how many never entered the public record at all.

That distinction matters because “Hijra,” “transgender” and the government-recognised category commonly translated as “third gender” are frequently used interchangeably in Bangladeshi police records and news coverage, although they do not describe precisely the same populations.

The Hijra community has its own social and cultural identity, and not every transgender person is Hijra. The inconsistencies make an already incomplete count harder to construct.

What can be reconstructed, however, is troubling.

The Waadaa review found one reported killing in 2020, two in 2021, two in 2022 and three in 2023. It identified at least three clear killings in 2024, along with another suspicious death, and four in 2025. Two more killings were documented in 2026 before Moushumi was found dead this month.

Rights-group figures provide another measure of the violence.

JusticeMakers Bangladesh in France, or JMBF, which tracks abuses against LGBTQI+ people largely through media reports and its own documentation, recorded five transgender women murdered in five incidents in 2024.

It also recorded 10 LGBTQI+ suicides that year and 83 people injured in physical assaults. Its broader monitoring found 396 LGBTQI+ people affected by different forms of abuse in 70 incidents in 2024, up from 219 people in 56 incidents the previous year.

Even those numbers depend largely on incidents that become known.

A community largely ignored

For people inside the Hijra community, that is the central problem. A death can disappear from the statistical record almost as easily as a life can disappear from public view.

“There is no regular record of who in our community has died or how they died,” said Ivan Ahmed, president of Forty Up Bangladesh, a Hijra organisation. “When someone dies, we hear about it among ourselves. But there is no central information on the cause of death, where the person died or how many people have died.”

Ivan told Waadaa that greater media attention and social media had made some deaths more visible. But there was no reason to assume every death reached journalists, activists or even Hijra organisations elsewhere in the country.

Many Hijra people live outside their biological families and within community networks built around gurumas. Those networks can provide shelter and belonging to people who have experienced rejection elsewhere. But when somebody dies, there is not necessarily an institution responsible for recording the death beyond ordinary police or civil registration processes.

The result is statistical invisibility.

A death may exist in a hospital register. A murder may exist in a police case. A burial may be known to a local Hijra group. But there is no mechanism bringing those records together to produce a comprehensive picture of deaths within the community. 

The Department of Social Services’ own account illustrates the gap: it works from population data held by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, while unnatural deaths are left to individual police stations. Neither process produces a national mortality record for Hijras.

Shapla, a member of the Hijra community in Savar, said organisations sometimes kept their own information, but she knew of no reliable nationwide count.

“One of our gurumas in Savar has died,” she told Waadaa. “Beyond that, we don’t hear about every Hijra person who dies. We don’t have figures showing how many died in a particular year, how many died naturally and how many were killed.”

The consequences become clearer when individual cases are placed beside one another.

On February 3 last year, neighbours in Betbunia, in Rangamati’s Kawkhali upazila, became concerned after they had not seen Shila, a Hijra community leader who lived alone in a rented house.

They entered the house and found her on the bed.

Her throat had been cut. There were stab wounds to her abdomen. Police learned that several people had visited the house the previous night and initially suspected she had been killed then.

Unlike many cases that quickly disappear from public view, Shila’s investigation produced arrests. Four people were arrested within days. Police said they suspected that a dispute over influence within the local Hijra community may have been behind the killing.

Shobha Sarkar, a Hijra outreach officer at the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, or BLAST, said the organisation was now monitoring the investigation into Moushumi’s death and providing legal assistance.

For her, the two deaths are part of a longer history.

Moushumi was far from the only Hijra person to have died under unnatural circumstances, Shobha told Waadaa. There had been many such deaths in the past, she said, without visible justice following them. The effect, she added, has been to deepen insecurity among people already accustomed to living on society’s margins.

Strange deaths

Shila was not an isolated case.

In 2023, three transgender people were killed: Babul Mridha in Shariatpur, Sohel Rana, known as Dustu, in Brahmanbaria, and Abdul Khaleque in Gazipur.

The following year brought more names.

Reshma Khatun was killed in Jashore. Mangali, also known as Poly, was hacked to death in Manirampur. Ayub Ali was found dead in an abandoned house in Tangail. Another death, that of Mau Hijra in Jashore, prompted allegations from rights advocates that the circumstances were suspicious.

Then came 2025. Ador Khan, 24, died in Habiganj after allegedly being detained and tortured over a missing mobile phone. Shila was killed in Rangamati. Toshi Hijra’s body was recovered from a canal in Faridpur. Payel, also identified in records as Kamal Hossain, was killed in Dinajpur.

And the killings continued into 2026.

In May, Mahi, also known as Enamul Haque Shishir, died after allegedly being tied up, doused with kerosene and set on fire. Days later, Yasmin, 26, was found with her throat slit at a poultry farm in Narsingdi.

Then came Moushumi.

These individual cases do not establish a single motive. Some appear to have involved robbery. Others involved personal relationships, disputes, alleged torture or conflicts within communities. It would be misleading to classify every killing automatically as an anti-Hijra hate crime.

But together they expose something else: Bangladesh cannot reliably say whether violence against Hijra people is rising or falling because it does not systematically count their deaths in a way that allows the question to be answered.

Mortality data can reveal patterns invisible in individual police cases — unusually high suicide rates, particular forms of violence, untreated illnesses, geographical concentrations of deaths or vulnerabilities associated with age and poverty.

Without such data, policymakers are left trying to address a population’s health and security without knowing how its members are dying. For Hijra activists, the missing death count is part of a larger problem with the country’s approach to recognition.

“We have been recognised through a government gazette and given voting rights, but we still lag far behind when it comes to opportunities and benefits,” Shobha said. “Only a small number of Hijra people receive a monthly allowance of 600 taka. Beyond that, there is hardly any meaningful social protection or financial support.”

The government has introduced training programmes intended to improve livelihoods, she said, but often without the financial support needed afterward to establish a business or become economically self-sufficient. Training can therefore end without creating a sustainable source of income.

Lack of recognition

Joyita Tanu, Mymensingh divisional president of Setubandhan Kalyan Sangstha, sees the same disconnect between formal recognition and daily life.

“The government provides us with training,” she told Waadaa. “But there is no effective plan for what happens afterward or how that training is supposed to improve our lives. Since Moushumi’s killing, all of us have felt increasingly unsafe.”

Training without employment or access to capital, Joyita said, cannot by itself alter the economic circumstances of the community. Safety and economic independence, she argued, have to be addressed together.

Parbati Ahmed, president of the Hijra organisation Shustho Jibon, said Moushumi’s death had heightened that sense of vulnerability.

“We are traumatised,” she told Waadaa. “We already face discrimination as citizens. When someone from our community dies, there is still some hesitation to get proper death certificates from the hospital as the burial is done within the community.”

Joyita Tanu of Mymensingh told Waadaa that the problem often persists even at the point of death.

Before the government formally recognised Hijras as a separate gender category in 2013, those who obtained national identity cards had generally been registered as either male or female, she said. That older classification can follow them into hospital records years later.

“To obtain a death certificate from a hospital, we have to show the person’s voter ID card,” Tanu said. “So in many cases, the death certificate ends up recording a Hijra person as either male or female.”

The problem shows one reason Hijra deaths can effectively disappear into broader mortality statistics: even when a death is formally registered, the deceased may not necessarily be identifiable in the records as a member of the Hijra community.

Dr Mahadi Abdur Rouf of Ad-din Akij Medical College Hospital in Khulna told Waadaa that doctors issuing death certificates have to rely on the identity documents presented to them.

“We have to issue the certificate according to the voter ID card or birth certificate,” he said. “We have to go by the papers here. There is no other option available to us.”

Mizanul Haque Mitu, general secretary of Padmakuri Hijra Foundation, described what that bureaucratic gap means from inside the community.

“When one of us dies, everyone talks about it for a few days,” Mitu said. “But what happens after that? How many others have died, and how did they die? Nobody wants to know.”

“It is as though even our deaths do not count among the deaths that are counted.”

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