POLICE are hunting down the assassins of three Kurdish activists shot dead in Paris even as Turkey said an internal feud in the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was most likely behind the slayings.
Judicial sources say the three female activists, including founding PKK member Sakine Cansiz, were each shot in the head at least three times, giving further credence to the theory of an execution-style hit.
Autopsies on the bodies revealed one of the women had been shot four times in the head and the other two shot three times, the sources said on Friday.
The killings came days after Turkish media reported Turkey and the PKK leadership had agreed on a roadmap to end the three-decade-old insurgency that has claimed more than 45,000 lives.
The PKK, which took up arms in 1984 for Kurdish self-rule in southeastern Turkey, is considered a terrorist organisation by Ankara and much of the international community.
Experts have suggested a number of potential motives for the killings, including an attack by Turkish extremists and internal feuding within the PKK.
The three were found dead on Thursday at the Kurdistan Information Centre in Paris's 10th district, after last being seen alive at the centre at midday on Wednesday.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday the slayings bore the hallmarks of an internal feud, noting that the victims appeared to have given the killer or killers access to the centre.
"The place was protected not by one lock but many coded locks," Anatolia news agency quoted Erdogan as telling reporters. "Those three people opened it (the door). I do not assume they would open it to people they didn't know."
But the Turkish leader also upheld his earlier suggestion that the slayings could be aimed at derailing peace talks between Ankara and the PKK's jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
A former guerrilla of the organisation, Cansiz was considered a close ally of Ocalan.
"The killings could be the result of an internal feud or steps aimed at disrupting the steps we are taking with good intentions," Erdogan said.
Experts have said potential internal feuding could be linked to the peace process or to other PKK activities, in particular conflicts over money.
A French judicial source said police are running 21 investigations into potentially illegal fundraising by the PKK.
The group raises funds through a "revolutionary tax" on Kurdish expatriates that authorities in several countries have condemned as extortion. Several PKK leaders have also been designated as drugs traffickers by the United States.
There are around 150,000 Kurds in France, the vast majority of them of Turkish origin.
Erdogan's government recently revealed Turkish intelligence services had for weeks been talking to Ocalan, captured in 1999 and held on an island prison south of Istanbul.
Under the reported peace roadmap, the government would reward a ceasefire by granting wider rights to Turkey's Kurdish minority, whose population is estimated at up to 15 million in the country of 75 million.
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