Kurds from around Europe protest against killings in Paris
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Thousands of Kurds marched in central Paris, France’s capital, on Saturday to commemorate three Kurdish female activists murdered a decade ago.
The march, an annual event since the killings on Jan. 9, 2013, came two weeks after a similar triple slaying on Dec. 23, 2022, at the Kurdish Cultural Centre in Paris just a few minutes walk from the site of the earlier shootings.
The organizers said at least 25.000 people from all over Europe joined the march.
The demonstrators carried banners with the pictures of the 2013 victims and slogans such as “The Turkish government has massacred three more Kurds”.
In 2013, Sakine Cansiz, 54, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), along with two other women: Fidan Dogan, 28 and Leyla Saylemez, 24 were killed at the Kurdish Information Centre in Paris’ 10th district.
Kurdish activists in France, home to the second-biggest Kurdish community in the European Union after Germany, have always believed that the Turkish secret service ordered the killings, something Ankara has always denied.
In May 2019, a French anti-terrorist judge was tasked with re-opening the investigation. But the victims’ families say the probe has been hampered by a lack of access to secret documents they say France has refused to declassify, the AFP reported.
In the attack of December 2022, Abdurrahman Kizil, singer Mir Perwer, and Amina Kara, leader of the Movement of Kurdish Women in France, were shot dead by a man named William Malet.
French prosecutors said the suspect, a retired rail worker, had admitted to wanting to “murder migrants”, but several Kurds who spoke to AFP said they suspected a “terror” act orchestrated by the Turkish state.
The murders sparked a major demonstration by Kurds in Paris on December 24.