KLANG: Police have ruled out the possibility of a hate crime in the death of a transgender here and believe it could have been due to the theft of a handphone.
Police received a call from Hospital Tengku Ampuan Rahimah at 3.43pm on New Year’s Day that the body of a woman had been sent there. The victim was said to have been thrown out of a vehicle on Jalan Batu Nilam in Bukit Tinggi 2.
South Klang district police chief ACP Shamsul Amar Ramli today said forensic examination later revealed that the unidentified victim was a transgender.
The post-mortem revealed that the victim died of severe head injuries as the result of falling from a moving vehicle. She also sustained wounds on the left eyebrow, legs and on her nose as a result of the fall, but according to the report, no marks on her body showed that she was involved in a struggle.
Police have initiated an investigation under Section 302 of the Penal Code for murder and arrested a 55-year old man to facilitate the investigation. He was remanded for seven days.
Preliminary investigations revealed that the suspect accused the victim of stealing his handphone. He confronted the victim who denied his accusation. He claimed that she jumped off the multi-purpose vehicle while it was still moving.
In another incident last month, a 32-year-old transgender from Sabah was severely beaten up by several youths who believed she had stolen a cell phone from them.
Meanwhile, activist Nisha Ayub has called for the authorities to establish laws against hate crimes following the incident.
In 2015, Sameera Krishnan was kidnapped, beaten up and tortured by several men near the Simpang Lima cemetary.
The transgender was rescued after her captors got into a traffic dispute with another motorist on the way out of Klang.
Policemen, who arrived at the scene, to break up the fight, discovered Sameera tied up in the back seat.
However, Sameera, 26, was murdered in Kuantan in February 2017. She was found dead with a gunshot wound and her body mutilated. She had been shot in the posterior and four fingers of her right hand were cut off. She also had severe head injuries.
