PARIS, France (A.W.)—Thirty-four-year-old Omer Guney, the jailed suspect of the 2013 assassination of three female Kurdish activists in in Paris, died in hospital on Dec. 17, just days before his trial. Guney, the only suspect charged with the murders, reportedly died following a battle with a serious brain injury, a judicial source told international news outlet Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Guney was charged with the Jan. 10, 2013 murders of the co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Sakine Cansiz, Kurdistan National Committee (KNC) representative and head of the Kurdish Fidan Dogan, and activist Leyla Soylemez, who were shot dead at point blank at the Kurdish institute.
At the time of the murders, then French interior minister Manuel Valls said the three were “summarily executed.”
Guney was charged with “assassinations in connection with a terrorist enterprise” shortly after the assassinations. His trial was scheduled to start on Jan. 23, 2017, according to AFP.
Lawyers for the victims’ families issued a statement expressing the “anger of the families of the victims, deprived of a public trial for which they had waited for nearly four years.”
“France is still not able to judge a political crime committed on French territory by foreign secret services,” read another part of the statement signed by lawyers Sylvie Boitel, Antoine Comte, Virginia Dusen, Jan Fermon, and Jean-Louis Malterre.
French investigators had concluded that members of the Turkish secret service (National Intelligence Organization/MIT) were involved in the triple assassination, a judicial source told AFP.
Cansiz was a founding member of the PKK, and the first senior female member of the organization. She led the Kurdish protest movement out of Diyarbakir prison in Turkey in 1980’s. Later, she worked with PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in Syria, and was a commander of the women’s guerrilla movement in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. Until her assassination, Cansiz headed the PKK women’s movement in Europe
Be the first to comment