In paris At least three killed in shooting attack

Gunman Kills at Least 3 in Paris attack

At least three people have been killed and three others wounded when a gunman opened fire at a Kurdish cultural centre in Paris, as President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “heinous” attack targeting France’s Kurds.

Several gunshots were fired on Rue d’Enghien at about midday (11:00 GMT) on Friday, sowing panic on a street lined with small shops and cafes in the French capital’s busy 10th district.

All three of those who died were Kurdish, a lawyer for the Kurdish cultural centre told the Reuters news agency. Three others were wounded, one of them with life threatening injuries.Authorities said a 69-year-old former train driver was arrested as a suspect. The Paris prosecutor said the man had recently been released from detention while awaiting trial over an attack on a migrant camp in Paris a year ago, and that investigators were considering a possible racist motive for the shooting.

Mr. Darmanin what say about gunman

Mr. Darmanin said the gunman, whom the police did not name, was a French citizen who had never been flagged by French intelligence services and did not belong to any known far-right extremist groups. But he was the member of a shooting club and had “many” registered firearms, Mr. Darmanin said. The Paris prosecutor said the man, who lived in Paris, had a criminal record.

Mr. Darmanin, the interior minister, said he had asked French security forces to heighten security at Kurdish community gathering places around the country, as well as at Turkish diplomatic sites.

same thing happened 10 years ago

“The same thing happened 10 years ago, it seems that it will never end,” said the man who declined to give his name out of fear for his security referring to the killing in 2013 of three Kurdish activists in the same arrondissement of Paris, including Sakine Cansiz, a Kurdish separatist who was a founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.

The party has fought a decades long insurgency against the Turkish state. Turkey, the United States and the E.U. consider the P.K.K. a terrorist organization.

The Kurds are a large ethnic group in the Middle East, with tens of millions of people mostly living in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. After World War I, Western powers vowed to create a Kurdish state only to change their minds a few years later, leaving the Kurds as minorities in other states that have often sought to suppress their ethnic identity and language.

A range of groups have formed to fight or advocate for Kurdish rights, independence and autonomy over the decades, sometimes through violent insurgencies against their governments.

On the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, which runs perpendicular to the Rue d’Enghien, 50 or so men and a handful of women shouted angry slogans against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — even though there was no information suggesting Turkish authorities were in any way connected to the attack.

Kurdish Democratic Council of France

The Kurdish Democratic Council of France, a group whose headquarters are at the same address as the cultural center, rejected the French authorities’ hypothesis that the suspect was targeting foreigners in general but not Kurds specifically. The group suggested, without presenting any evidence, that Turkey was to blame.

At a news conference on Friday evening, the group expressed anger that prosecutors had not opened a terrorism investigation and said one of the victims was the head of a Kurdish women’s movement in France.

“We are currently outraged by this situation,” said Agit Polat, a spokesperson for the Kurdish Democratic Council of France.