Shepherd and prefect assassin who ended up killed by another prisoner in Arles prison, Yvan Colonna is a Corsican name, face and tragedy.
Before being the most wanted man in France for the murder of the prefect Claude Erignac in 1998, Yvan Colonna is a shepherd who practices near his native village of Cargèse, on the west coast of the island of beauty.
Since his adolescence spent in Nice, Yvan Colonna has developed a certain fascination for the FLNC (Corsican National Liberation Front), which militates, via attacks and plastic attacks, for the independence of Corsica.
Colonna exerts a discreet but resolute activism on him.
Despite the fratricidal struggles in which Corsican nationalists kill each other, Colonna remains inhabited by the idea of an independent Corsica and is interested in a new faction of the movement,
dubbed “the group of anonymous people”.
Purists of the cause ready to go all the way.
On February 6, 1998, in the early evening, the prefect Claude Erignac, the highest representative of the French state in Corsica, was shot three times in a street in Ajaccio.
The "group of anonymous" claims this act, which creates a shock wave on the island and on the continent.
In the spring of 1999, a little over a year after the prefect's assassination, Colonna's name appeared in the investigation, delivered by members of the “group of anonymous people” while in police custody.
Read alsoCorsica says goodbye to Yvan Colonna
Very quickly, the shepherd will give a brief interview to a TF 1 team in which he proclaims his innocence.
“I am accused of facts, but I only say one thing: prove it.
Prove it.
But the next morning, Yvan Colonna went on the run.
A run that will last 1,503 days.
It is reported in South America, in the Paris region, but in reality, Yvan Colonna has never left Corsica, between a hideout in an apartment in the center of Bastia, an isolated house above the eastern plain and a sheepfold on the heights of Propriano.
It was in this sheepfold that the RAID arrested him on July 4, 2003. Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, announced the news himself during a meeting.
France then discovers the first photos of the fugitive, shirtless in the maquis.
The Corsican shepherd will pass three times before an assize court, where he will be found guilty three times, without ever admitting the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac.
He had been serving his sentence in Arles prison since then.
On March 2, 2022, Yvan Colonna was violently attacked by a fellow prisoner in the gym.
After three weeks in a coma, he died at the Timone hospital in Marseille.
His attack and his death provoke very violent demonstrations on the island.
His body is repatriated to Cargèse where the burial takes place in front of a compact crowd.
More than twenty years after his crime, the shepherd still enjoys a form of fascination among certain independence activists.
On July 28, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announced "the initiation of disciplinary proceedings" against two agents from the prison of Arles, in the Bouches-du-Rhône, after the submission of a report on the assassination of Yvan Colonna in March, which concluded to "failures" on their part.
Read alsoDiscover all the episodes of Crime Story
