The Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDK-F) has said that the armed attack that killed three Kurdish activists in Paris on 23 December was organised and had a political motivation in a dossier it released on Thursday, examining the suspicions about the attack.
CDF-K said that the 69-year-old gunman arrested by French authorities “was most likely recruited by the ‘Grey Wolves’ (Turkish ultra-nationalists) for their own purposes” and called for a comprehensive investigation into the incident.
Although the French authorities and the media tend to view the attack as a merely racist attack, CDF-K stated that the area where the attack took place was a street full of restaurants and shops run by migrants of various origins and emphasised that the attacker only targeted Kurdish businesses and the Kurdish cultural centre.
“At the time of Friday’s attack, there was to be a meeting at the cultural centre of about 60 women, all members of the Kurdish Women’s Movement in France (TJK-F), to plan the tenth anniversary of the commemorations of the assassination of Sakine Cansız, Fidan Doğan and Leyla Şaylemez on January 9, 2013,” said the CDF-K.
On 9 January 2013, a Turkish intelligence-affiliated man shot dead three Kurdish women, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) founding member Sakine Cansız and activists Leyla Şaylemez and Fidan Doğan, in another Parisian Kurdish locale.
The meeting on 23 December was postponed by an hour, due to disruptions in public transport, the CDF-K said, pointing out that the gunman may have actually targeted this meeting:
“If the meeting had started on time, the assassin would probably have succeeded in carrying out a massacre of about 60 representatives of the Kurdish Women’s Movement in France. The timing of the attack suggests that the choice of target was not random.”
The CDF-K also posed 12 questions to the French authorities that needed to be answered to shed light on this attack:
