While the state of health of Yvan Colonna, plunged into a coma, remains stable, his attacker placed in police custody took refuge in silence.
This Thursday morning, the motivations that prompted the jihadist Franck Elong Abé, 36, to attack the Corsican independence activist on Wednesday March 2 remain unknown.
Since his arrest, the jihadist, sentenced to nine years in prison for association of terrorist criminals (AMT) and who was released in 2023, is described as "cold, calm, posed but not prostrate".
The fact remains that the anti-terrorist prosecutor's office announced at the start of the afternoon that it would take up the investigation.
“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, motivate this referral”, he specifies in a press release.
The police officers of the DZPJ Sud, in charge of the investigation, do not know if it is a stroke of madness or a deliberate settling of scores following a dispute between the two men.
One thing is certain: the two prisoners occupied the same wing of the central house in Arles and used to see each other during sports activities, in particular during bodybuilding sessions.
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It is moreover in the room dedicated to this activity that the attack took place on the 61-year-old Corsican prisoner, convicted of the death of the prefect Claude Érignac on February 6, 1998, and sentenced to life imprisonment. .
The prison's CCTV cameras made it possible to accurately reconstruct the tragedy.
We see the jihadist, who holds a job as a paid household assistant in detention, heading, accompanied by two supervisors, towards the weight room in which the Corsican detainee is then alone.
According to the images, the door closed and the supervisors left, the jihadist immediately threw himself on Yvan Colonna who was lying on the ground, beat him up then crushed his windpipe with his foot for more than a minute.
A scene of exceptional violence.
Shoe marks will be noted on the victim's neck by the supervisors.
Franck Elong Abé will then cover the head of the Corsican shepherd with a plastic bag to try to finish him off by suffocating him.
The management of radicalized detainees in prison in question
It was the jihadist himself who gave the alert, declaring to the supervisors: “Colonna felt unwell.
On Wednesday evening, the Tarascon prosecutor's office indicated that he was in a post-anoxic coma, a type of coma resulting from oxygen deprivation in the brain.
Me Patrice Spinosi, the victim's lawyer and that of the Colonna family, clarified that the Corsican shepherd was not brain dead.
There is “no improvement or deterioration,” he told AFP.
This attack once again raises the question of the management of radicalized detainees in prison.
The course of Franck Elong Abé is indeed punctuated by convictions, a dozen mentions in his record and a first incarceration from the age of 20, marked above all by an early jihadist commitment.
Born in Cameroon and having grown up in Normandy, he was arrested at the age of 26 while fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.
He thus spent two years behind bars, in the Bagram detention center, a sort of local Guantanamo, before being handed over by the American authorities to France in 2014. He was then sentenced to nine years in prison for criminal association. terrorists but multiplies the violent incidents in prison and is the subject of many changes of establishments.
Read alsoYvan Colonna seriously injured in prison: his attacker “known to be a very dangerous inmate”
In March 2015, he tried to escape from the hospital-prison of Seclin (North) by threatening a female doctor to stick a sharp object in his throat if he was not taken to the football stadium.
He receives four years in prison.
Transferred to Condé-sur-Sarthe prison (Orne), he multiplied the damage in the summer of 2019, in particular fire starts, to demand his transfer.
He was sentenced to an additional nine months, passed through the Nantes detention center before landing in Arles in October 2019 where he seemed to have calmed down since.
“An overwhelming responsibility” of the State, according to Gilles Simeoni
Since the tragedy, anger has quickly spread in Corsica where the reconciliation of Yvan Colonna in a prison on the island has long been requested.
Requests made primarily by the Corsican shepherd who is placed under the status of "particularly reported detainee" (DPS), which prevents him from being imprisoned in Borgo prison, but which have all been refused, specifies the one of his lawyers, Me Emmanuel Mercinier-Pantalacci.
The president of the executive council of Corsica, Gilles Simeoni, estimated this Thursday on France Inter that the State bears "an overwhelming responsibility" in this aggression.
Vigilance instructions have been issued by the central management of the national police.
In a telex emanating from the Central Directorate of the CRS to its troops, which we obtained, "it is requested to increase the monitoring and securing of sites, in particular institutional ones, which may be the subject of threats".
In addition, the document recommends "strengthening internal security measures" for all law enforcement deployed in the field.
This morning, the University of Corsica located in Corte (Haute-Corse) was blocked by students.
Garbage cans and pallets had been placed to block the entrance to the university.