The National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) announced on Thursday March 3 that it was taking over the investigation into the violent attack, on Wednesday, of the Corsican independence activist Yvan Colonna at the prison of Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône) by a fellow prisoner. sentenced for terrorism.
“The circumstances of the facts and the first elements of the investigation which seem, as it stands, to exclude a dispute of a personal nature, justify this referralexplains the PNAT in a press release. Moreover, the jurisdiction of the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office also results from the ongoing execution of a sentence for a terrorist offense by the person in question. » 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 ninety-six hours.
The investigations are entrusted to the central directorate of the judicial police (DCPJ), to the general directorate of internal security and to the anti-terrorist sub-directorate of the DCPJ.
Aggressor sentenced for acts of jihadism
According to our information, the attacker, a 36-year-old Cameroonian, was convicted in 2015 of acts of jihadism. Arrested in Afghanistan in 2012 by the Americans, he was handed over to France two years later. He was serving a nine-year prison sentence for “criminal conspiracy to prepare an act of terrorism”.
Yvan Colonna, 61, was still in a coma on Thursday morning in Marseille, in stable condition, said Patrice Spinosi, his lawyer and that of the Colonna family, insisting that he was not in a state of death. cerebral.
The activist, sentenced to life for the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac, was the victim “from strangulation with bare hands and then from suffocation” while he was bodybuilding alone, Tarascon prosecutor Laurent Gumbau announced on Wednesday.