ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey’s foreign minister protested to his French counterpart Catherine Colonna on Thursday over the presence of French politicians at a December 24 rally in Paris after three Kurds were killed in a shooting in the 10th arrondissement of the capital.
Several thousand people, including the leader of La France insoumise Jean-Luc Mélenchon, took part in the demonstration, marked by clashes, the day after the death of two men and a woman, shot dead in rue d’Enghien by a man 69 years old, indicted and remanded in custody for “murder and attempted murder on grounds of race, ethnicity, nation or religion.”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon had denounced a “terrorist act”.
Demonstrators also waved flags of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), considered terrorist by Ankara.
“Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (…) stressed that it is unacceptable that French politicians attended events during which flags of the PKK terrorist organization and posters of its leader (Abdullah Öcalan, detained) were brandished. He said that France should not allow such demonstrations,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said following a telephone exchange between the minister and Catherine Colonna.
Turkey had announced on Monday the summoning of the French ambassador to denounce the “participation of government officials and French politicians in anti-Turkey propaganda”.
(Report by Huseyin Hayatsever; French version Jean Rosset; editing by Sophie Louet)
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