Strasbourg, 23/01/2013 (Agence Europe) - “We are firmly convinced that these attacks sought to destroy the negotiation process which has just started between the Turkish government and Abdullah Ocalan”, said Ertugrul Kürkcü this Tuesday 22 January, at a press conference held at the Council of Europe, on the sidelines of the first session of 2013 of the Parliamentary Assembly. In the view of this member of the Party for Peace and Democracy [Barýs ve Demokrasi Partisi, “Party for Peace and Democracy”of Turkey which is fighting for a resolution of the Kurdish issue, women's rights, ecology and the creation of a democratic society in Turkey] (BDP), the murder of three women in the Kurdistan Information Centre building in Paris on 9 January of this year is due to “powers opposed to the process of reconciliation in Turkey”. “I am almost sure of this”, he said. As for the Turkish suspect arrested as part of the enquiry, he stressed that this man had only extremely tenuous links with the Kurds - contrary to a number of statements placing him close to the PKK [Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK-Partiya Karkêren Kurdistan), deemed to be a terrorist association by Turkey, the United States and the European Union and founded by Abdullah Ocalan, who is currently imprisoned on the island of Imrali] - and “suffers from mental health issues”, according to his family. On that basis, “it is unlikely that this man would have been able to kill three healthy women with three bullets fired virtually simultaneously”, Ertugrul Kürkçü concluded, voicing concern at the statements by the Turkish authorities suggesting that such incidents could happen again in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. “We are therefore calling on all parties to abstain from provocative declarations”, he said, before going on to pay tribute to Fidan Dogan, a Kurdish woman living in Strasbourg who was active at diplomatic level and well-known at the Council of Europe, where she accompanied BDP delegations. Nursel Kilis, of the Kurdish Human Rights Centre in Switzerland, called on the Council of Europe and the European Union to bring pressure to bear on the French government to “clarify the affair”. (VL/transl.fl)