Three Kurdish women activists have been found dead with bullet wounds to the neck and chest in the Kurdistan information centre in Paris.

One of the women found in the early hours of Thursday was said to be Sakine Cansiz, a co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK).

Officials in Turkey have been holding talks with the PKK's jailed leader, Abdullah Öcalan, to persuade the group to disarm. The decades-long conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK has killed about 40,000 people since the 1980s.

Another victim of the Paris shootings, Fidan Dogan, was part of the Kurdistan National Congress, based in Brussels. The third was a young activist.

Kurdish groups in Turkey said the murders could be part of an attempt to sabotage the peace talks. Mehmet Ali Ertas, an activist and journalist at the pro-Kurdish news agency DIHA in Diyarbakir, said: "These murders happened during a pivotal moment. Military operations [against the PKK] and the talks [with Öcalan] are both ongoing.