THOUSANDS attended a funeral in Paris on Tuesday for three Kurds shot dead in a racially motivated attack in December.

The ceremony at Villiers-le-Bel, north of Paris, saw many mourners wrapped in the flags of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Kurdish-controlled Rojava territory in northern Syria.

The huge crowd followed the funeral on giant screens erected in the car park, showing the coffins surrounded by wreaths beneath a portrait of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Mr Ocalan is serving a life sentence on a prison island off Istanbul after being captured by Turkish agents in Kenya in 1999.

A racist gunman, William Malet, killed two men and one woman in a December 23 attack on the Ahmet Kaya community centre in Paris’s 10th arrondissement.

His victims were Abdurrahman Kizil, singer and political refugee Mir Perwer and Emine Kara, a leader of the Movement of Kurdish Women in France.

After his arrest Mr Malet told investigators he had a “pathological” hatred for foreigners and wanted to “murder migrants,” prosecutors said.   

The Democratic Council of Kurds in France called Tuesday’s ceremony an “opportunity for those who wish to pay their final respects before the bodies are repatriated to their native soil” for burial.

“We feel like they’re doing everything they can to crush us, whether it’s here or in Turkey,” said Celik, a local who attended the funeral and asked that her family name not be published for security raisons.

“We’re here because it’s our duty, it’s a battle our parents fought for many years and that we must continue,” she said.

A march was set to take place on Wednesday in tribute to the December victims, on the street where the shootings took place.

On Saturday, a “grand march” of the Kurdish community will set off from Paris Gare du Nord.

The march was originally planned to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2013 killing of three Kurdish activists linked to the PKK.

Other attacks have taken place against the Kurdish community in France. 

Last April three men were beaten with iron bars at a Kurdish cultural centre in eastern French city, Lyon. The attack was blamed on members of the now banned Turkish ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves group.

The PKK, which has waged an almost four-decade armed struggle for greater rights for Turkey’s Kurdish minority, is categorised as a terror group by Ankara, Europe and the United States.