PARIS — Three Kurdish women, including a founding member of a leading militant group fighting for autonomy in Turkey, were shot to death at a Kurdish institute in central Paris, police officials said on Thursday, potentially complicating fragile efforts to negotiate a cease-fire in the decades-old conflict.
News reports identified one of the women as Sakine Cansiz, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by the initials P.K.K. Another was identified as Fidan Dogan, the head of the institute and a representative of the Kurdistan National Committee. The third woman was Leyla Soylemez, a youthful Kurdish activist.
The women’s bodies were discovered shortly before 2 a.m. on Thursday, according to Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, and the antiterror department of the prosecutor’s office will oversee the investigation.
“No hypothesis can be excluded at this stage" about the motive for the killing, she said, declining to confirm the identities of the victims.
Earlier, a police official said the circumstances of the killings “could lead to the conclusion that this was an execution but inquiries will determine the precise nature of this drama.” Visiting the institute on Thursday, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls called the killings “intolerable” and said they were “without doubt an execution.”
Berivan Akyol, an employee at the Kurdish Institute of Paris, located in the 10th district of the city near the Gare du Nord railroad station, was quoted by Reuters as saying the killings — which opened a new chapter in the often murky annals of Kurdish exile life — were “politically motivated.”
While Kurdish militants blamed Turkey, Turkish officials said the women could have been killed because of feuding within the P.K.K. Huseyin Celik, the deputy chairman of the ruling party in Turkey, said the shootings seemed to be part of “an internal feud,” but offered no evidence to support the claim, The Associated Press reported.
Police officials said a murder investigation had been opened. The bodies and three shell casings were found in a room at the institute. The women were all said to hold Turkish passports.
The P.K.K. has been fighting a bitter guerrilla war against the Turkish authorities for almost three decades to reinforce demands for greater autonomy. The conflict has claimed some 40,000 lives. But, recently, Turkish officials have acknowledged that the authorities in Ankara have negotiated a tentative peace plan with the imprisoned P.K.K. leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
Turkey, the United States and the European Union have labeled the P.K.K. a terrorist organization, but sympathy for the group and its goals remains widespread in many towns in Turkey’s rugged southeast.
Restive Kurdish minorities span a broad region embracing parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and parts of the former Soviet Union.
The killings, which apparently took place Wednesday, inspired hundreds of Kurdish exiles to gather outside the institute, chanting “We are all P.K.K.” and accusing Turkey of assassinating the three women, abetted by the French president, François Hollande, French television reported.
The bodies were first discovered in the early hours of Thursday by Kurdish exiles who had become concerned about the whereabouts of the women.
The victims had been alone in the building on Wednesday and could not be reached by telephone in the late afternoon, according to Leon Edart, who manages the center. Mr. Edart, speaking to French reporters, suggested the victims may have opened the door to their killer or killers.
An organization called the Federation of Kurdish Associations in France, representing many of the 150,000 Kurdish exiles in the country, said in a statement that the women might have been killed on Wednesday afternoon with weapons equipped with silencers.
The Firat news agency, which is close to the P.K.K., said two of the women had been shot in the head and one in the stomach. Firat quoted Mehmet Ulker, the head of the Kurdish representative group in France as saying” “A couple of colleagues saw blood stains at the door. When they broke the door open and entered they saw the three women had been executed.”
Most of the Kurdish exiles in France are from Turkey. Their presence dates to the mid-1960s when migrant workers from Turkey began arriving in France.
The killings came against a complex political backdrop after the Turkish government opened talks with the political wing of the P.K.K. in Oslo last year. The negotiations faltered after a recent surge of violence in southeastern Turkey that prompted complaints from nationalist Turks that the authorities should not talk to the guerrilla fighters.
In the absence of any clear-cut military outcome, democracy advocates in Turkey have been pressing for a political settlement which would give greater rights to the Kurds, who account for around 15 million of Turkey’s 74 million population.
In a speech on Wednesday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the negotiations were being conducted by senior intelligence officials. Mr. Ocalan, the P.K.K. leader who has been imprisoned since 1999, still has a powerful following among the rebels. He has been denied a role in earlier political talks. But, analysts say, his participation in the current negotiations, authorized by the state, has enhanced the prospects of a breakthrough.
Turkish news reports have said the government wants the rebels to lay down their arms without preconditions and send fighters with a record of violence into exile in Europe, leaving other Kurdish representatives to join Turkish political life. But analysts say any further negotiations could be sabotaged by opponents if it appeared that talks were making firm progress.
