The report notably draws a parallel between the “severity” of the prison treatment imposed on Yvan Colonna and the negligence of the central house in Arles from which his attacker, Franck Elong Abé, a former jihad fighter in Afghanistan, benefited.
A series of “malfunctions” and of “serious faults”. The parliamentary commission of inquiry responsible for investigating the fatal attack on Yvan Colonna published, Tuesday, May 30, a severe report for the prison administration. The rapporteur Laurent Marcangeli (Horizons MP for Corse-du-Sud) and the chairman of the committee, Jean-Félix Acquaviva (Liot MP for Haute-Corse) wanted to “shed light on all the mechanisms that may have led to this tragedy”.
For six months, the commission of inquiry conducted more than thirty hearings and established various shortcomings in the prison treatment of Franck Elong Abé, the radicalized prisoner who beat and strangled Yvan Colonna on March 2, 2022, while this the latter was serving a life sentence for the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac in 1998.
The two men, imprisoned in the central house of Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône) at the time of the facts, were under the regime of the status of particularly reported prisoners (DPS), which is applied to prisoners according to their level of dangerousness. or the risk of escape they present. “There are only 225 DPS in France out of 70,000 detainees”, states the report. However, the prison treatment of Franck Elong Abé and Yvan Colonna reveals a “undeniable difference in treatment” between the two men.
“An erratic, even permissive management” by Franck Elong Abé
The report indeed recalls the profile “dangerous, violent and unstable” by Franck Elong Abé, a 36-year-old former jihadist in Afghanistan, and classified as TIS (for “Islamic terrorist”). He denounces “a poor appreciation of the dangerousness of the aggressor” who benefited from a “‘leniency’ at this stage still unexplained”the rapporteur is surprised.
Indeed, before his assignment to the central house in Arles in 2019, the man, who was imprisoned in 2014, went through “five establishments in five years”. His journey, which was mainly carried out in an isolation ward, was “punctuated by suicide attempts and incidents, often of extreme gravity”. Among these acts of violence, we find the attack on an intern in the specially equipped hospital unit of the Lille-Loos-Sequedin prison center in February 2015. “With a handcrafted weapon”he had surrounded her and threatened her, declaring: “I’m warning you: if you try to hit your security beep, you won’t have enough time before I’ll have that pickaxe shoved down your throat.”
However, this manifest dangerousness never led to him being assigned to a radicality assessment district, despite “eight requests for evaluation over the period 2016-2022”. These highly secure units, created in 2016, make it possible to assess radicalized detainees to determine which prison care would be best suited to their profile.
Worse still, in the eyes of the authors, Franck Elong Abé found himself placed “in ordinary detention and in general service employment” on his arrival at the central house in Arles. From September 2021, he was indeed authorized to practice as “as a cleaning assistant for the sports halls of the building“. A situation “extraordinary”, deplores the report: he was the only inmate in France with both DPS and TIS status to work at the “general service”, allowing autonomy of movement within the remand center.
This decision appears all the more “incomprehensible”, given the serious “psychiatric disorders” presented by Franck Elong Abé. In particular, he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which made him all the more likely to act out.
The care “without indulgence” of Yvan Colonna
The authors of the report believe that this course “blatant contrast” with that of Yvan Colonna, who was subjected to a “particularly strict management of detention”, while the independence activist had not caused any “actual incident for nineteen years”. Indeed, from his arrest in 2003 until his death in March 2022, the independence activist turned out to be a prisoner “appreciated and respectful towards staff and fellow inmates”underlines the document.
However, the DPS status was applied to him “during his entire incarceration despite his non-existent dangerousness“, thus preventing his transfer to a Corsican prison. As of July 2014, “several referrals” relatives asked for his transfer to the Borgo detention center (Haute-Corse). To justify their request, the lawyers of Yvan Colonna had in particular recalled “that he has not seen his mother for fifteen years and the youngest of his sons for three years.”
For the authors, Yvan Colonna and the two other detainees of the “Erignac commando” – Alain Ferrandi and Pierre Alessandri – were the subject of a “‘special’ and ‘political’ management”. They criticize in particular the line of the national anti-terrorist prosecution, which has always refused the lifting of DPS status to Yvan Colonna, despite the analysis “field players” who ensured that he presented a “low risk of escape” and one “perfect prison course”.
On this aspect, the report makes a recommendation “symbolic” : the State must commit “formally” on family reunification of Corsican detainees, by carrying out the necessary security work at the Borgo penitentiary centre.
An “abnormal lack of surveillance” at the central house in Arles
“If the establishment is not faced with prison overcrowding, the criminal profile of the prisoners in the central house is very heavy”points to the report, stating that “88% of the detainees imprisoned in the central house of Arles were sentenced to criminal sentences”. He regrets that the staff, although very experienced, is in “insufficient number” and faced with many “inmate assaults”including an attempted murder of several agents, which occurred in August 2020.
It would therefore be necessary to strengthen the “security”for which the Arles establishment is “on the pick up”, according to a quoted supervisor. In particular, the defect is pointed out “unnatural” surveillance, which allowed Franck Elong Abé to remain alone for more than ten minutes with Yvan Colonna. We also need to improve the “feedback circuit”, “obviously faulty” for the authors of the text: the sentence “I’m going to kill him”, heard by a supervisor and possibly attributable to Franck Elong Abé, as well as the change in his behavior shortly before the attack, had not been reported to the hierarchy.
Furthermore, the rapporteur regrets the use “clearly failing” video surveillance, despite the presence of “50 cameras” in building A, where the attack took place, for lack of personnel to monitor the images. He is also surprised “of the great confusion of the unfolding of the facts”, regretting that the explanations of the management and the supervisors “do not appear fully convincing”.
The motivations of the aggressor in question
Of the “shadow areas” still surround the motivations of the deadly attack: Franck Elong Abé justified his act by “blasphemies” of Yvan Colonna, to which the chairman of the commission Jean-Félix Acquaviva says he finds it difficult to believe. “The agents of the prison administration, including members of the management, strongly relativize or do not believe that Yvan Colonna could have ‘blasphemed'”he wrote in the foreword to the report.
The writers of the text consider, however, that the theory of the premeditation of the aggression is to be taken seriously, because the aggressor seemed to be aware of the malfunction of the surveillance camera system at the time of his passage. This information “could have been known to the person concerned” as the information circulates quickly in the central house of Arles, described as a “village”.
At this stage, “no guesswork” cannot be ruled out as to the motivations of the aggressor, including that of a “political assassination linked to the resentment, the ‘hate’ that certain spheres maintained against the members of the ‘commando Érignac'”, assures Jean-Félix Acquaviva. The MP for Haute-Corse mentions in particular the “thesis of the action ‘barbouze'” than many Corsicans “do not exclude”and hopes that the judicial inquiry still in progress will study “all assumptions”.