French police are hunting for the killers of three female Kurdish activists who werefound shot dead at a Kurdish information Center in Paris. The victims included Sakine Cansiz a co-founder of the Kurdish nationalist group the PKK.
The other two victims were named as Paris representative of the Kurdistan National Congress Fidan Doğan, and junior activist Leyla Söylemez. Reports suggested that the women had been shot execution style, two dying from bullet wounds to the neck and another from gunshots to the head and neck.
Reuters reports that "Turkish nationalist militants have in the past also been accused of 'extra-judicial killings' of Kurdish activists but such incidents have been confined to Turkey.
The killings came shortly after Turkey announced it had re-opened talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader jailed on the prison island of Imrali, near Istanbul. The talks to end the conflict would almost certainly raise tensions within the movement over demands and terms of any ceasefire.
"Rest assured that French authorities are determined to get to the bottom of these unbearable acts," French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said at the scene.
France is home to a large number of Kurds, many of them having emigrated in the 1960s and 1970s, but there is also a number of Kurdish pro-PKK exiles such as Cansiz.
Any Turkish government contacts with the PKK, deemed a terrorist group by Ankara, Washington and the EU, are highly controversial in the Turkish political establishment."
