Watch: Transgender Woman’s Beating Allegedly By Police Caught On Video

The beating of a transgender woman by two men — one allegedly a police officer — in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, was caught on tape by a local news channel.

News channel 6 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, caught on video the beating of a transgender woman by two men, one of whom allegedly is a member of the Honduran police, a federal military organization. San Pedro Sula is Honduras’ second-largest city. Both Honduras and San Pedro Sula have the highest murder rate in the world. 

Channel 6’s report identifies the transgender woman as “the tranny,” as Queerty reports.

Local source La Prensa, which describes the victim as “the tranny,” claims the woman is a sex worker. She reportedly attracted the attention of police and the Channel 6 news crew when an altercation with a client became disruptive — she reportedly broke the window of his truck when he refused to pay for her services.

The video begins after two military police officers arrive at the scene. The deadbeat client can be seen kicking, punching, and throwing the woman to the ground as two military police officers look on. At one point during the video, one of the officers — in full military gear — can be seen kicking the victim and pushing her down the street.

Gay Star News adds:

The video shows the trans woman being punched, kicked and thrown to the ground where she severely knocks her head.

Antonio Sanchez, spokesman of the Armed Forces of Honduras, denied the police had anything to do with the mistreatment of the woman.

‘The video was manipulated,’ he said.

However, LGBTI activists have slammed the video, saying it is another example of how LGBTI people are marginalized and victimized.

Mario Schauer, activist and amanger of eqaulit group Breaking the Taboo, said the video was ‘homophobia at its best.’

‘The LGBT community is the most ignored,’ she said.

The Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers last month published an interview with Honduran LGBT activist Nelson Arambú of the Diversity Movement in Resistance, who “told the Blade that 176 LGBT Hondurans have been reported killed between the 2009 coup and May.”

These include Walter Tróchez, a prominent LGBT rights advocate who was shot to death on a Tegucigalpa street in December 2009, and Erick Martínez, a journalist and activist who was strangled to death in 2012 after leaving a gay bar in the Honduran capital.

Arambú told the Blade police officers in Tegucigalpa killed 10 trans people in the three months after the 2009 coup. An Amnesty International report indicates a group of armed men wearing bulletproof vests and balaclavas kidnapped a trans sex worker in the city of San Pedro Sula and killed her before placing her body into a plastic bag and dumping it alongside a road.

Here’s the News Channel 6 video:

 

Image: Screenshot via YouTube