A Corsican nationalist whose death in prison has turned him into a martyr for some was to be buried yesterday amid unease in Paris about fierce public support for the convicted killer.
Yvan Colonna, a former goat herder on the French Mediterranean island, was announced dead on Monday after being attacked and strangled in prison on March 2.
The 61-year-old was serving a life sentence after his conviction of assassinating a senior French official in 1998, but he is seen as a hero by some for his role in the violent struggle for Corsican independence.
Photo: AFP
“We want to show to the French state that there is a Corsican people,” local musician and independence advocate Jean Mattei, 72, told reporters on Wednesday night during a vigil for Colonna attended by thousands. “When you touch one of us, we’re all there, whatever our divisions.”
Colonna was to be buried in his family fiefdom of Cargese on the island’s rugged west coast.
News of the attack against him by an alleged Islamic extremist sparked several nights of rioting early this month and led the French government to make a surprise offer of talks about increased autonomy for the island.
An estimated 4,000 people lined the streets on Wednesday evening after his body arrived by plane in the island’s capital, Ajaccio, including many burning flares and flying the black-and-white Corsican flag.
Marches, vigils and a decision to lower flags on the regional council building and at Ajaccio’s airport this week underlined public affection for Colonna while causing deep unease on the French mainland.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the decision to lower flags was “an error and inappropriate” in an interview on Wednesday.
Colonna was tried and convicted three times for murdering then-Corse-du-Sud prefect Claude Erignac by shooting him at point-blank range in the head in 1998 as he headed to a theater performance with his wife.
Although he maintained his innocence, Colonna went on the run before being arrested four years later when police tracked him down to a remote mountainous area in the south of the island.
The killing of Erignac was the most shocking of about 4,500 attacks carried out by the National Liberation Front of Corsica from the 1970s until the end of its armed struggle in 2014.
“The death in the way it happened, in prison, for Yvan Colonna was an offense,” French Socialist Party First Secretary Olivier Faure told RTL radio on Thursday. “But to make him into a hero, to give the impression that he is a model for the young generations, is a scandal.”
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