Report: 216 LGBT Related Murders in Brazil in 2014

There have been 216 LGBT related murders in Brazil this year, according to a new report as cited by Gay Star News.

Gay Group of Bahia collected their data between January and Sept. 29 and said the research is based on police records and news reports as there are no other official statistics on LGBT related murders in Brazil, which does not have any hate crime laws protecting people based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

According to the report, Brazil's northeast region had the most LGBT murders, with 43 percent. The city with more cases per capita was Cuiaba, with 0.03 murders per 1,000 inhabitants.

Nearly 60 percent of the murders were of gay men. Thirty-five percent of the murders were of "transvestites," according to the report and 4 percent were of lesbians.

LGBT activist Carlos Tufvesson told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo that the country needs to create hate crime laws protecting LGBT people.

"It is important to note that there are gay right, left, black, white people. It will never be possible to please everyone," he said, according to GSN. "For homoaffective citizens, the most important cause has not been cited in debates: Our main demand is equalizing the crime of homophobia to racism. Nowadays it is treated as a normal assault crime, while a hate crime has greater penalties."

The National Secretariat of Human Rights says there were 337 complaints relating to anti-gay incidents from January to April. There were 97 incidents in Sao Paulo alone.

The report comes about a month after Joao Antonio Donati, an openly gay 18-year-old from Brazil, was found dead as a result of what is believed to be an anti-gay attack. The teen's body was found in a vacant lot with his neck broken and his mouth stuffed with paper.