Three people were killed and three others injured on Friday morning, December 23, after a man opened fire on rue d'Enghien, in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, in a shopping district popular with the Kurdish community. The events took place in the Ahmet-KayaKurdish Cultural Center and two nearby businesses, including a hair salon, also Kurdish.
The Ahmet-Kaya Cultural Center, a rallying point for the community in the capital, is home to the Centre Démocratique Kurde de France (CDKF), which is the main branch of the Kurdish nationalist movement in France and the legal front for the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is at war with the Turkish state and considered a terrorist organization by the European Union.
According to Kurdish sources, the gunman, equipped with a gun and several magazines, shot three people on the front steps and inside the cultural center. He even chased one of his victims, who managed to cross the street and take shelter in a Kurdish restaurant. After this initial cold-blooded shooting, the attacker allegedly went up the busy Rue d'Enghien to enter a hairdressing salon popular with Kurds. He fired again, wounding at least one person before the customers disarmed and restrained him while waiting for the police, as shown by video surveillance.
One of the victims had fought against the Islamic State
The three victims are one woman and two men. According to Agit Polat, the CDKF spokesman, the woman is Emine Kara, the head of the Kurdish women's movement in France. She had fought and advocated for 30 years across Kurdistan, in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. According to Berivan Firat, a spokeswoman for the CDKF, Ms. Kara had been very active in the fight against the Islamic State organization (IS), with weapons in hand, during the recapture of Raqqa by Kurdish forces supported by the international coalition. She had since applied for political asylum in France and was refused refugee status by OFPRA (Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides), a decision she appealed.
The two men are a Kurdish singer who is a political refugee in France and an old regular of the Ahmet-Kaya cultural center. Among the three injured men, one is in critical condition and the other two in moderate danger. The Paris public prosecutor's office announced the opening of an investigation for murder and attempted murder, entrusted to the Direction Régionale de la Police Judiciaire (DRPJ).
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The suspect, arrested at the crime scene, is a retired train driver of French nationality, William M., 69 years old, who lives in Paris. Injured in the face when he was arrested, he was immediately placed in police custody. The man is known to the justice system for three cases, including a racist attack. He had been sentenced a first time, in 2017, to a six months suspended prison sentence for possession of prohibited weapons. In June 2022, he was again sentenced, this time to 12 months in prison, for acts of violence with a weapon committed in 2016, a conviction which he appealed, said the prosecutor in a statement.
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