Kurdish rebels suggested yesterday that clandestine Turkish nationalists may have assassinated three Kurdish activists in Paris, but Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the killings appeared to have been the result of an internal feud.
The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) said the execution-style killings of the three women in an institute in central Paris had been premeditated and planned and warned France would be held responsible if it failed to get to the bottom of their deaths.
Sakine Cansiz, a founding member of the PKK, and two fellow activists were found shot in the head early on Thursday in an attack which shocked the Kurdish community and overshadowed peace moves between Turkey and the rebels.
Turkey put its missions in Europe – home to a large Kurdish diaspora – on alert and asked the French authorities to boost security around its interests there, after the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) called for protest meetings.
In Berlin, home to a large Kurdish and Turkish population, some 700 Kurds demonstrated in the streets, many carrying posters of the three women.
One group carried a sign saying, “Women are murdered, Europe is silent.”
“The targeting of three of our female comrades at a time like this is a premeditated, planned and organised attack,” said a statement on the website of the armed wing of the PKK, deemed a terrorist group by Ankara, Washington and the European Union.
“France has a responsibility to elucidate these killings immediately. Otherwise, they will be held responsible for the massacre of our comrades.” The statement blamed “international and Turkish Gladio forces” for the killings, a reference to Nato’s Cold War anti-communist Gladio operations, now used in Turkey as shorthand for alleged state-sponsored nationalist violence.
Shadowy Turkish nationalist groups are believed to have killed hundreds of activists in the mainly Kurdish southeast over the past three decades in unsolved murders.
Turkish media reports have also suggested the possible involvement of Damascus or Tehran, which have Kurdish minorities and are at odds with Nato member Turkey over issues including the conflict in Syria.
Erdogan said that while investigations needed to be completed before a definitive conclusion could be reached, evidence so far pointed to an internal feud, as the building was secured by a coded lock which could be opened only by insiders.
“Those three people opened it. No doubt they wouldn’t open it to people they didn’t know,” Erdogan told reporters on his plane returning from Senegal yesterday, according to the state-run Anatolian news agency.
He said the killings could also have been intended to sabotage efforts towards peace talks with the PKK.