PARIS, Jan 10: Three female Kurdish activists including a founding member of the PKK rebel group were shot dead in Paris overnight in execution-style killings that cast a shadow over peace moves between Ankara and the guerrillas.

Dozens of riot police formed a cordon around the Information Centre of Kurdistan, an institute in central Paris with close links to the PKK where the bodies were found soon after midnight on Thursday. According to one Kurdish agency, workers broke in after seeing blood stains at the door.

Sakine Cansiz, who had promoted the role of women in the armed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) group, and two other women appeared to have been shot in the head, a French police source said. According to Kurdish media one woman had also been shot in the stomach.

It was not immediately clear who had carried out the killings; but the PKK has seen intermittent internal feuding during an armed campaign in the mountainous Turkish southeast that has killed some 40,000 since 1984.

The killings came shortly after Turkey announced it had re-opened talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader jailed on the prison island of Imrali, near Istanbul.—Reuters