Gunmen in Pakistan kill trans woman, friend

A transgender woman and her friend were shot and killed by gunmen on a motorcycle in the northwestern city of Peshawar, police in Pakistan said.

The two were targeted as they traveled in a rickshaw late on Tuesday night, police officer Mohammad Tahir said, noting the motive for the killing remains unknown.

Dozens of transgender people have been killed in recent years, mainly in the conservative Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, of which Peshawar is the capital. 

The Trans Action Alliance, a local rights group, says 55 have been killed there in the last three years.

No one has claimed the killings, but Islamic extremists, who associated transgender people with prostitution, are active in the region.

In June, Pakistan issued its first third-gender passport to a transgender activist, who hailed the move as a step forward for the marginalised community in the deeply conservative South Asian country.

Farzana Riaz, a transgender woman in northwestern Peshawar city, said the new passport would help her campaign globally on behalf of her community, who are also known as khawajasiras - an umbrella term in Pakistan denoting a third sex that includes transsexuals, transvestites and eunuchs.

"I have received my passport which mentions my gender as X and not as a male or female," Farzana told AFP on Saturday.

"Earlier I had a passport which had described my gender as a male. But this time I told the authorities that I won't accept my passport if it doesn't identify me as a transgender," the 30-year-old co-founder and president of rights organisation TransAction said.

"Now it will be more convenient for me to travel abroad because earlier I faced problems at international airports because of a contradiction in my appearance and sex mention on my passport," she added.

Modern-day Pakistani transgender people claim to be cultural heirs of the eunuchs who thrived at the courts of the Mughal emperors that ruled the Indian subcontinent for two centuries until the British arrived in the 19th century and banned them.

In 2009, Pakistan became one of the first countries in the world to legally recognise a third sex, allowing transgenders to obtain identity cards, while several have also run in elections.

They number at least half a million people in the country, according to several studies.