I’Yvan Colonna’s attacker explained his gesture to the investigators by a “blasphemy” allegedly committed by the Corsican detainee, currently between life and death, Agence France-Presse learned Thursday, March 3 from sources familiar with the matter.
Franck Elong Abé, detained in Arles prison for acts of terrorism, argued during his police custody that Yvan Colonna would have “spoke badly about the Prophet” and that this was the reason why he had assaulted on Wednesday in the sports hall of the remand prison. This 36-year-old Cameroonian, presented as a “jihadist”, had been serving a nine-year prison sentence since 2016 for “criminal association with a view to preparing an act of terrorism”.
“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”, indicated the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (Pnat), which seized Thursday of the investigation, in a press release, adding that its jurisdiction “also results from the ongoing execution of a sentence for a terrorist offense by the person in question”.
READ ALSOCorsica: after the aggression of Yvan Colonna, the nationalists accuse the State
“We will do whatever it takes to get the truth out”
Franck Elong Abé’s police custody is now continuing for “attempted assassination in connection with a terrorist enterprise”. The referral to the Pnat “will lead to the extension of police custody up to 96 hours, and the perpetrator should therefore be transferred from Marseille to the premises of the Sdat (anti-terrorist sub-directorate) by Friday evening” , she added.
“We are obviously going to do everything necessary for the truth to be revealed,” promised France Inter the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. Yvan Colonna, 61, was still in a coma Thursday morning in Marseille, in stable condition, told Agence France-Presse Mand Patrice Spinosi, his lawyer and that of the Colonna family, insisting that he was not brain dead.
The independence activist, sentenced to life for the assassination of the prefect Claude Érignac in 1998, was the victim of “strangulation with his bare hands and then suffocation” while he was doing bodybuilding alone, had indicated Wednesday the prosecutor of Tarascon, Laurent Gumbau. But in Corsica, questions and accusations abound on a possible responsibility of the State while Yvan Colonna has long demanded his rapprochement on the island.