According to an elected nationalist and the family lawyer, a report from a prison guard disappeared from software reserved for the prison administration. But according to the specialized magistrates, this alert was in fact never informed.
This is the first official reaction of the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) after the controversy over the attitude of the prison administration on the sidelines of the assassination of Yvan Colonna. The specialized magistrates claim that there is no proof of the erasure of sensitive data, a thesis raised last week by a parliamentary commission of inquiry and by the lawyer for the family of the Corsican nationalist activist. Sentenced to life for the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac in February 1998, Yvan Colonna had been violently beaten on March 2, 2022 by another inmate in the prison of Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône). He died a few weeks later, on March 21.
Alongside the judicial investigations, a parliamentary commission of inquiry was created. Last week, its president, the nationalist deputy of Haute-Corse Jean-Félix Acquaviva, suggested that an alert, which occurred the day before the attack, had been underestimated by the prison administration. According to the words of the elected official, a supervisor heard a group of three detainees, including the main suspect, the jihadist Franck Elong Abé, pronounce this sentence: “I’m going to kill him.” According to Jean-Félix Acquaviva, the supervisor also alerted her management before noting, the same day, his observations in a software reserved for particularly flagged prisoners.
Still according to Jean-Félix Acquaviva, this alert could have been voluntarily erased after the attack on Yvan Colonna. “We have the greatest questions and the greatest doubts (…) as to the possible attempt to erase this data” in the software of the penitentiary administration, declared the deputy, Wednesday March 15, during a press conference. “When the commission wanted to check the traces left on this software (…), they realized that they were not there”resumed Sylvain Cormier, one of the lawyers of the Colonna family, on France 3. “Either the software malfunctioned or we erased.”
Towards a lifting of defense secrecy?
To this hypothesis of deletion, the national anti-terrorist prosecution brings a denial to France Télévisions. According to the specialized magistrates, the supervisor never declared having filled in the file. The data on the discussion of the three detainees cannot therefore have been erased since, according to the Pnat, they did not appear in the software.
“In the context of the judicial investigation opened for assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise and criminal terrorist association, the investigations relate in particular to the observations of the prison guards before, during and after the facts.recall the magistrates of the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office. It is not indicated that the report on these threatening remarks would have been integrated into the software and therefore, subsequently, deleted.
In parallel with the investigations of the commission of inquiry, the judicial investigations are continuing to find out whether the attacker, who acted alone, could have been instrumentalized. The investigating judges asked for the lifting of defense secrecy. They want to check if Franck Elong Abé was a referenced source of prison intelligence, a thesis put forward by the family of Yvan Colonna and by the parliamentary commission of inquiry.