Gwladys Laffitte with AFP
modified to
4:22 p.m., March 03, 2022
“The circumstances of the facts and the first elements of the investigation which seem, as it stands, to exclude a personal dispute, motivate this referral”, explains the prosecution. In police custody, the alleged attacker of Yvan Colonna explained his gesture by the fact that the Corsican detainee would have blasphemed God.
In a press release, the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat) says it is seizing the facts of the assault on the Corsican detainee Yvan Colonna. “The circumstances of the facts and the first elements of the investigation which seem, as it stands, to exclude a personal dispute, motivate this referral”, explains the Pnat. Referral also motivated because the alleged aggressor is currently serving a nine-year sentence for acts of terrorism. The investigation is now open for attempted murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise. The anti-terrorism public prosecutor will hold a press conference in the coming days.
The police custody of Yvan Colonna’s attacker, Franck Elong Abé, is now continuing for “attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise”. It can last up to 96 hours. According to first elements, he explained his gesture by the fact that the Corsican detainee would have blasphemed God. The investigations are entrusted to the central directorate of the judicial police (DCPJ), the general directorate of internal security (DGSI) and the anti-terrorist sub-directorate of the DCPJ.
The perpetrator was serving a nine-year sentence
According to two sources familiar with the matter, the attacker, a 36-year-old Cameroonian, is a “jihadist”. Arrested in Afghanistan in 2012 by the Americans, he was handed over to France two years later. Sentenced in April 2016, he was serving a nine-year prison sentence for “criminal association with a view to preparing an act of terrorism”.
Yvan Colonna, 61, was still in a coma on Thursday morning in Marseille, in stable condition, Me Patrice Spinosi, his lawyer and that of the Colonna family, told AFP, insisting that he was not not brain dead. The activist, sentenced to life for the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac, was the victim of “strangulation with his bare hands and then suffocation” while he was doing bodybuilding alone, the Tarascon prosecutor had indicated on Wednesday. , Laurent Gumbau.