Three Kurdish women have been found dead in central Paris, one of them reportedly a founding member of the Turkish opposition movement PKK.
The women were found with gunshots to the head in the early hours of Thursday at the Kurdish Institute of Paris, CNN cited police in Paris as saying.
Turkey’s Anadolu news agency named one of the women as Sakine Cansiz, whom the Associated Press described as a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has been at war with the Turkish government since 1984.
Anadolu — which labels the PKK a “terrorist organization” — named the other two women as Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, also believed to be PKK activists.
A police official told the AP that police and firefighters discovered the bodies at about 1:30 a.m. Thursday.
CNN cited French Interior Minister Manuel Valls as saying that the three women had been “without doubt executed.”
The killings were “totally unacceptable,” he added, saying that an anti-terror unit had been mobilized.
An employee of the Information Institute of Kurdistan told Reuters: “There is no doubt this was politically motivated.”
However, the killings come just a day after the Turkish government announced that it had brokered a deal with the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, the BBC points out.
The deal was to create a “roadmap” to end the 30-year insurgency in Turkey that has claimed the lives of 40,000 people.
This story was originally published by Global Post.