We can imagine the rumor swelling, since the beginning of the afternoon of Wednesday, in the mineral alleys of Cargèse, this Corsican seaside town north of Ajaccio. Yvan Colonna, 61, is between life and death. The child of the country, sentenced to life imprisonment for the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac, in 1998, was violently attacked in the morning, with his bare hands, by an inmate of the prison of Arles. Very quickly, his lawyers “denies” on social networks the announcement of his death. While the “shepherd of Cargèse” would be in a state of “brain death” according to family sources, another source, close to the investigation, indicates that he was transferred from the intensive care unit in Arles to a hospital in Marseilles, at the end of the afternoon. Emmanuel Mercinier-Pantalacci and Sylvain Cormier, his lawyers, talk about a “post-anoxic coma”, confirmed by the Tarascon prosecution in a press release. The ministry is content to refer modestly to a “aggression”, without dwelling on the state of health of the separatist, and indicates having seized the general inspection of justice, “at the request of the Prime Minister”, “to shed all the light” on this event “of particular gravity”.
“Assassination attempt”
The altercation took place in the morning. Yvan Colonna was alone in the weight room when Franck Elong Abé, another prisoner, entered to clean the room, according to the Tarascon prosecutor. “The first elements collected make it possible to establish that Yvan Colonna was the victim of strangulation with his bare hands, then of suffocation”, states its press release. We do not know the reasons for this surge of violence against the Corsican nationalist. According to an internal prison source, the course of Franck Elong Abé would be enamelled with attacks on other prisoners and burning of cells. At 36, the Cameroonian “jihadist” arrested in Afghanistan in 2012, handed over to France in 2014, had been sentenced to nine years in prison for “terrorist association of criminals”. He had been in Arles remand center since 2019 and was released from December 2023. Here he is now placed in police custody for “attempted assassination”, indicates the Tarascon prosecutor, announcing that he has entrusted the investigation to the criminal brigade of the zonal direction of the South judicial police. The national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office was also called upon.
But how to explain that Franck Elong Abé was able to harm one of the most watched detainees in France? The Corsican nationalist is listed in the list of particularly flagged detainees, a status which implies heightened vigilance and specific security measures. It is because of this status that he could never be imprisoned at home. “It is considered that when you are marked with the DPS seal, you can only be incarcerated in prison centers with very high security levels, which is not the case with the two Corsican prison establishments”, recall his lawyers. Guided by the intention of seeing their client’s registration canceled in this file, they had just formulated, on January 22, a new appeal against a decision of the Marseille administrative court. “Yvan Colonna must be able to serve his sentence close to his home, we have been pleading in this direction for years, relying on European prison rules”, they then insist. Wednesday evening, Me Patrice Spinosi, the lawyer for the Colonna family was indignant in a press release: “The state was legally responsible for security (…) will have to answer to his family” he warned.
Perpetuity
Yvan Colonna has always denied having fired the fatal bullets at the prefect of Corsica, Claude Erignac, on February 6, 1998. Arrested in 2003 after four years on the run in the Corsican maquis, he was sentenced on June 20, 2011, at the end of three trials, to life imprisonment. After the announcement of his attack, this Wednesday, the association for the defense of Corsican prisoners Sulidarita, which calls for the rapprochement in Corsica of detainees from the island, challenged the government: “The only question we ask French justice is this: is their death in detention really your objective?”