Every 25 hours, at least one LGBTI person is murdered in Brazil.

That’s the shocking number the Gay Group of Bahia (GGB) reveals in the 2016 version of its annual survey.

Over the last 12 months, the group registered 343 deaths connected to homophobic, biphobic and transphobic in the last year – 173 gay men, 144 trans people, 10 lesbians and four bisexuals.

The GGB also identified 12 victims as straight.

Some of them had been in relationships with trans or bisexual people. Others, like Luiz Carlos Rosas, died because of being close to the LGBTI community.

Rosas was killed on Christmas Day at a São Paulo subway station after he defended a gay man and a trans person .

‘These alarming numbers are the tip of an iceberg of violence and blood,’ Luiz Mott, who collected the survey data, said.

‘Since there are no government statistics on hate crimes, they are always under-reported because our database is based on news published in the media, the internet and personal information.’

He also runs the website Quem A Homotransfobia Matou Hoje (‘Whom has homophobia killed today?’).

Nearly half of the victims were killed by strangers – either clients, if they were sex workers, or one-night-stands.

For the first time, the GGB didn’t just count homicides, but also included suicides motivated by prejudice and discrimination against their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The real numbers are possibly even worse, but Brazil does not keep any data on the crimes against the country’s LGBTI community.

Because of this, the GGB relies on media reports 168 Brazilian municipalities to keep track of homo-, bi- and transphobic hate crime.

But the lack of records makes it hard to accurately track how many people were really killed for identifying as, or even just association with, a member of the LGBTI community.

The survey also revealed something else: since they started their survey, 37 years ago, the number of crimes has steadily be growing.

In 2000, the GGB registered 130 murders. The number doubled in 2010, and in 2015 they registered 318 cases.

And 2017 is already looking bleak.

In the first 22 days, 23 LGBTI people have been murdered – and those are just the ones we know about.