MEMBERS of France’s Kurdish community and its supporters held a silent march on Monday to honour three people killed in last week’s shooting at a Kurdish cultural centre in Paris.

Prosecuters say that the attack was motivated by racism, but Turkey summoned France’s ambassador over what it claimed was “black propaganda” by Kurdish activists in the wake of the shooting.

Some Kurds have marched in Paris with flags of the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) or suggested that Turkey was linked to the attack.

A 69-year-old Frenchman, identified by French media as William K, received preliminary charges on Monday of racially motivated murder and weapons violations over Friday’s shooting, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

The alleged gunman told investigators that he had wanted to kill migrants or foreigners and then to kill himself.

According to prosecutors, the suspect told them that he had a “pathological” hatred of non-European foreigners.

The silent march was organised by a French Kurdish community shocked by the killings.

Demonstrators marched from the site of the shooting to the location where three female Kurdish activists were found shot dead in 2013.

“Every day, we ask ourselves when someone will shoot at us again. Ten years ago, we were attacked in the heart of Paris and 10 years later again,” said Dagan Dogan, a 22-year-old Kurd on Monday’s march.

“Why was nothing done to protect us?”

Some skirmishes broke out in the district where the killings took place on Friday and again on the sidelines of a mostly peaceful Kurdish-led demonstration on Saturday.

Anti-racism activists and left-wing politicians have linked the shooting to a climate of online hate speech and anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric by far-right figures.

The French government has reported a rise in race and religion-related crimes and violations in recent years.

Authorities said that Friday’s attack was an isolated incident, but some Kurdish activists in Paris believe that it was politically driven.

Following Turkey’s summoning of French ambassador Herve Magro, the country’s authorities said that they expected “France to act prudently over the incident and not to allow the [banned PKK] terrorist organisation to advance its sneaky agenda,” the Anadolu news agency reported.

The PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, a conflict that has killed tens of thousands of Kurds and displaced many more.