- French Interior Minister Manuel Valls says slayings are totally unacceptable
- Police: Three Kurdish women are found dead with gunshot wounds to the head
- The bodies were found in the early hours in the Kurdish Institute of Paris
- The victims' identities have not yet been released by police
(CNN) -- Three Kurdish women were found dead with gunshots to the head in the early hours of Thursday, police in Paris said, in an unexplained act of violence that will likely shock the Kurdish community.
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls told reporters in Paris the three women had been "without doubt executed" and described the killings as "totally unacceptable."
The bodies were found at about 2 a.m. local time in the Kurdish Institute of Paris, in a central district of the capital, a police representative said.
Valls said one of the victims was the head of the institute's Kurdish information center, Fidan Dogan.
The minister said an anti-terror unit had been mobilized alongside the criminal police to investigate.
It's not yet clear what the motive for the killings might be.
Many members of the city's Kurdish community live near the institute, located in Paris's 10th district.
Valls expressed his condolences to the relatives of the three women, adding that Dogan was known to many through her work in the information center.
A criminal investigation is under way, according to police. They have not yet confirmed the names or ages of the three women.
A statement on the French website Jeunesse Kurde (Kurdish Youth) urges Kurds and friends of the Kurdish people to gather in Paris Thursday.
Leon Edart, of the Federation of Kurdish Assocations in France, told CNN affiliate BFM-TV that the women had been alone in the information center on Wednesday afternoon.
According to the website of the Kurdish Institute, it is an independent, non-political and secular cultural organization which brings together Kurdish artists and intellectuals, as well as Western experts on Kurdish culture.
The ethnic Kurdish population extends across parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
The Turkish government has recently embarked on a new, highly-publicized round of peace negotiations with the jailed leader of Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, Abdullah Ocalan.
The PKK is a pan-Kurdish nationalist movement better known internationally for the guerilla war it has fought for nearly three decades against the government of Turkey. The violence, the country's oldest and deadliest ethnic conflict, has claimed more than 30,000 lives.
