The facts took place in the morning in the courtyard of the establishment, when an inmate, for reasons still unknown, violently attacked Yvan Colonna with his bare hands, said a police source, confirming information from BFMTV.
Yvan Colonna was transferred in the afternoon from Arles hospital to a Marseille hospital, we learned from a source close to the investigation. “I inform that Yvan Colonna is in a post-anoxic coma”, also indicated one of his lawyers, Me Emmanuel Mercinier Pantalacci. This type of coma results from oxygen deprivation in the brain.
“His condition is very serious, his vital prognosis is engaged. For the moment, he is in intensive care, he is not dead, “said a source close to the investigation a little earlier. “His condition is very worrying,” confirmed another source close to the case, adding that his attacker had put a “bag” on the head of the detainee, who lost consciousness. The judicial police have been seized of the investigation for attempted assassination.
Who is his attacker?
The detainee who seriously injured Yvan Colonna is a 36-year-old Cameroonian jihadist, sentenced to nine years in prison for terrorist criminal association, we learned from a source close to the case.
This is Franck Elong Abé. He had been arrested in Afghanistan. The motives that led him to attack the Corsican independence activist, leaving him between life and death, are not known at this time.
What protection?
“The family is devastated, it’s hell,” said Sylvain Cormier, one of Yvan Colonna’s lawyers. Me Cormier found it “particularly astounding that while Yvan Colonna is one of the most closely watched detainees in France by virtue of his status […] which prevents him from being closer to his relatives in Corsica, the prison administration proved incapable of ensuring his basic protection”.
In a tweet, the association for the defense of Corsican prisoners Sulidarita, which calls for the rapprochement in Corsica of detainees from the island, urged the government: “The only question we ask the French judiciary is this: Is their death in custody really your goal? ». Imprisoned in Arles, Yvan Colonna had submitted several requests for reconciliation in Corsica, all of which were rejected.
Why was he in jail?
Now 61 years old, Yvan Colonna was arrested in July 2003 for the assassination of the prefect Erignac in February 1998 in Ajaccio, after four years on the run in the maquis. He always denied the facts.
Sentenced to life imprisonment in 2007 and then life imprisonment with a 22-year security sentence on appeal in 2009, he was sentenced a third time to life imprisonment (without security period) in 2011 after the cancellation by the Court of Cassation of the verdict of appeal for defect of form.