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Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris’s 10th Arrondissement Alexandra Cordebard, and many other female French politicians commemorated on Monday three Kurdish women who were killed in an attack in Paris 10 years ago.
Hidalgo laid wreaths at the place where Sakine Cansız, Fidan Doğan and Leyla Saylemez were assassinated by a Turkish gunman allegedly linked to Turkish intelligence.
French authorities have failed to reveal details of the 2013 assassinations, and the gunman died in prison in 2016, before facing trail. The tenth anniversary of the 2013 murders came immediately after another attack on Kurdish targets on 23 December in the French capital’s 10th Arrondissement.
During the ceremony on Monday, Cordebard called on French authorities to lift the confidentiality order on the case file related to the 2013 attack. The mayor also demanded the appointment of an anti-terror judge to oversee the case related to the December attack, in which three people were killed and three others were wounded.
French authorities treat the December attack as a racist crime committed by a 69-years-old French gunman who acted alone. The Kurdish community in France and beyond believe that the incidents -a decade apart- are related, and that Turkey has played a role in both.
Civil society organisations, including France-Kurdistan, the anti-racist movement MRAP and the Danielle Mitterrand Foundation also joined the ceremony, which ended with an moving Kurdish song.
