Thomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Members of the Kurdish community in France protested on Thursday near the institute in Paris where three Kurdish women were found killed.
PARIS — French police officials said on Thursday that the bodies of three Kurdish women, including a prominent member of the militant group fighting for greater autonomy in southeastern Turkey, had been found at a Kurdish institute in central Paris and appeared to have been shot in the head, news reports said.
French media identified one of the women as Sakine Cansiz, said to be a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by the initials P.K.K. Another was identified as Fidan Dogan, the head of the institute. The third woman was Leyla Soylemez, a youthful Kurdish activist.
Berivan Akyol, an employee at the Kurdish Institute of Paris, was quoted by Reuters as saying the killings were “politically motivated.”
Agence France-Press quoted an unidentified police official as saying the circumstances of the killings “could lead to the conclusion that this was an execution but inquiries will determine the precise nature of this drama.”
Police officials said a murder investigation had been opened. The bodies and three shell casings were found in a room at the institute. The women were all said to hold Turkish passports.
The P.K.K. has been fighting a bitter guerrilla war against the Turkish authorities for almost three decades to reinforce demands for greater autonomy. The conflict has claimed some 40,000 lives. But recent Turkish media reports have suggested that Turkish authorities have negotiated a tentative peace plan with the imprisoned P.K.K. leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
Turkey, the United States and the European Union have labeled the P.K.K. a terrorist organization, but sympathy for the group and its goals remains widespread in many towns in Turkey’s rugged southeast.
Restive Kurdish minorities span a region embracing parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and parts of the former Soviet Union.
The killings, which apparently took place Wednesday or early Thursday, inspired hundreds of Kurdish exiles to gather outside the institute, chanting “We are all P.K.K.” and accusing Turkey of assassinating the three women, abetted by the French president, François Hollande, Agence France-Presse reported.
The bodies were discovered at around 1 a.m. Thursday by Kurdish exiles who had become concerned about the whereabouts of three women.
The women were alone in the building on Wednesday but were unreachable by telephone in the late afternoon, according to Leon Edart, who manages the center. Mr. Edart, speaking to Agence France-Presse, suggested the victims may have opened the door to their killer or killers.
An organization called the Federation of Kurdish Associations in France, representing many of the 150,000 Kurdish exiles in the country, said in a statement that the women might have been killed on Wednesday afternoon with weapons equipped with silencers.
The Firat news agency, which is close to the P.K.K., said two of the women had been shot in the head and one in the stomach. Firat quoted Mehmet Ulker, the head of the Kurdish representative group in France as saying, “A couple of colleagues saw blood stains at the door. When they broke the door open and entered they saw the three women had been executed.”
While Kurdish militants blamed Turkey, Turkish broadcasters said the police believed the women could have been killed because of feuding within the P.K.K..
Most of the Kurdish exiles in France are from Turkey. Their presence dates to the mid-1960s when migrant workers from Turkey began arriving in France.
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls called the killings “intolerable.”
The killings came against a complex political backdrop after the Turkish government opened talks with the political wing of the P.K.K. in Oslo last year. The negotiations were suspended after a recent surge of violence in southeastern Turkey that prompted complaints from nationalist Turks that the authorities should not talk to the guerrilla fighters.
In the absence of any clear-cut military outcome, democracy advocates in Turkey have been advocating a political settlement which would give greater rights to the Kurds, who account for around 15 million of Turkey’s 74 million population.
In a speech on Wednesday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the negotiations grouped senior intelligence and government officials. Mr. Ocalan, the P.K.K. leader who has been imprisoned since 1999, still has a powerful following among the rebels.
Turkish news reports have said the government wants the rebels to lay down their arms without preconditions and send fighters into exile, leaving other Kurdish representatives to join Turkish political life. But analysts say any further negotiations could be sabotaged by opponents an agreement if it appeared that it would resolve the longstanding tensions.
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Top Kurdish Militant Among 3 Slain in Paris
