PARIS (Dispatches) -- Protesters have clashed with police in Paris as hundreds of people rallied to call for justice after a shooting in a mainly Kurdish neighborhood in the French capital that killed three people.
Live television footage on Saturday showed protesters throwing rocks and projectiles at police who used tear gas to disperse the crowd who had gathered earlier at Place de la Republique square, a traditional venue for demonstrations in the city.
A gunman carried out the killings on Friday as he fired on people at a Kurdish cultural centre, a nearby cafe and a hair salon in a busy part of Paris’s 10th district.
According to the Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDK-F), the dead included one woman and two men.
Emine Kara was a leader of the Kurdish Women’s Movement in France, the organization’s spokesman Agit Polat said. Her claim for political asylum in France had been rejected.
The other victims were Abdulrahman Kizil and Mir Perwer, a political refugee and artist, according to the CDK-F.
The shooting in a bustling neighborhood of central Paris also wounded three people, and stirred up concerns about hate crimes against minority groups at a time when far-right voices have gained prominence in France and around Europe in recent years.
The suspected attacker, 69, was wounded during the incident and is now in custody. He told investigators he was racist, a source close to the case said Saturday.
Last year, he was charged with attacking migrants and was released on bail earlier this month. Investigators considered a possible racist motive for the shooting.
He was found with a case loaded with a box of at least 25 cartridges and “two or three loaded magazines”, a source said. The weapon was a “much-used” U.S. Army Colt 1911 pistol.
After an angry crowd clashed with police on Friday afternoon, Kurdish community leaders called for a gathering from midday (11:00 GMT) on Saturday.
Reporting from the protest, Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid said there was frustration among members of the Kurdish community, many of whom believe they were deliberately targeted in Friday’s attack.
“They are still looking for answers from the police: Why did it take so long for them to arrive, why have they not designated this a terrorist attack and why they didn’t provide security to the cultural centre, which they had asked for earlier,” he added.
“People here are calling for justice and they want it now,” Bin Javaid said.
The Paris police chief met members of the Kurdish community to try to allay their fears before Saturday’s rally.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin

said the suspect was clearly targeting foreigners, had acted alone and was not officially affiliated with any extreme-right or other radical movements.
The suspect had past convictions for illegal arms possession and armed violence.
France’s Interior Ministry reported a 13% rise in race-related crimes or other violations in 2021 over 2019, after an 11% rise from 2018 to 2019. The ministry did not include 2020 in its statistics because of successive pandemic lockdowns that year. It said a disproportionate number of such crimes target people of African descent, and also cited hundreds of attacks based on religion.
In 2013, three women Kurdish activists, including Sakine Cansiz, a founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, were found shot dead at a Kurdish center in Paris.