(Marseille) Yvan Colonna, the Corsican independence activist sentenced to life for the assassination of the prefect Erignac, died Monday evening in Marseille, after three weeks of coma following his attack in prison, a tragedy which had led to violent demonstrations in the island.
Posted at 5:45 p.m.
“The family of Yvan Colonna confirms his death this evening at the hospital in Marseille. She asks that her mourning be respected and will not comment,” her lawyer Patrice Spinosi told AFP by text message, thus making official information also obtained by AFP from three police sources and initially given by the daily. The Parisian.
Solicited by AFP, the president of the executive council of the island, Gilles Simeoni, and the president of the Assembly of Corsica, Marie-Antoinette Maupertuis, the two main autonomist leaders of the island, did not wish to make of comment. The Isle of Beauty was very calm on Monday evening.
The 61-year-old nationalist activist, to whom justice had granted a suspension of sentence “for medical reasons” on Thursday, had been between life and death since his violent attack in early March at the central house in Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône ), where he was serving his sentence for participating in the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac in 1998 in Ajaccio.
He had been very seriously injured by a radicalized fellow prisoner, Franck Elong Abé, a 36-year-old Cameroonian presented as a “jihadist” who had attacked him in the prison gym. Yvan Colonna had been the victim of “strangulation with his bare hands and then suffocation” with a plastic bag, said Tarascon prosecutor Laurent Gumbau.
Franck Elong Abé, who was serving several sentences, including one of nine years’ imprisonment for “terrorist criminal association”, has since been indicted for attempted terrorist assassination.
“murderous French state”
According to several sources, the aggressor of Yvan Colonna had justified his act by the fact that the Corsican militant would have blasphemed and “spoke badly of the Prophet”.
This aggression had provoked an explosion of anger, with sometimes violent demonstrations, across all of Corsica, and this for nearly two weeks, behind a widely shared slogan of “French state assassin”. These tensions had culminated in riots on March 13 in Bastia, with a demonstration which left 102 injured, including 77 on the side of the police.
This anger was notably motivated by the length of Yvan Colonna’s attack, nearly eight minutes, under the gaze of a surveillance camera, without any supervisor intervening. It was the attacker himself who had alerted the guards, explaining that Colonna had “felt unwell”.
A few days before the Bastia riots, after taking the same step for Yvan Colonna, Prime Minister Jean Castex had lifted, in a spirit of appeasement, the status of “particularly reported detainee” (DPS) of Alain Ferrandi and Pierre Alessandri, the other two members of the “Erignac commando” sentenced to life imprisonment.
Calm finally returned to Corsica last week with a three-day visit by Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, during which the latter promised discussions with Corsican elected officials and the forces of the island that could lead to possible autonomy for the community.
This process of negotiations on the autonomy of Corsica will begin in April and must be concluded at the end of 2022, stipulates a text signed Friday by Gérald Darmanin and Gilles Simeoni.
This document also specifies that the lifting of the DPS status of Alain Ferrandi and Pierre Alessandri now opens the way to their “prompt rapprochement in the coming weeks to the Borgo detention center”, in Corsica.