Yvan Colonna is in a critical condition (he has since died, editor’s note). The 61-year-old Colonna, sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1998 murder of Prefect Erignac in Corsica, was violently attacked by another inmate in Arles prison (Bouches-du-Rhône) on Wednesday March the 2nd. He was hospitalised and his life is in danger. Some sources told Le Figaro that the prisoner was “brain dead”. The attacker is said to be a 36-year-old jihadist prisoner.
The attack allegedly occurred on Wednesday morning in the prison’s gymnasium, where the two men were doing strength training. “The inmate Elong-Abe lunged at Yvan Colonna and choked him. The guards intervened very quickly and gave first aid. We don’t know the reasons for his crime, although the man is known to commit repeated offences in detention,” a prison source told Le Figaro. He added: “He’s a criminal profile that keeps coming up in French prisons and who, when he was handed over by the Americans to the French authorities in 2014, had just spent two years behind bars at the Bagram detention centre.”
Lawyers for the Erignac commando have been demanding for several months that the prisoners, who have been held in Borgo prison for 25 years for the murder of the prefect, be brought to Corsica. Yvan Colonna, who has always denied the crime, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2007, to life imprisonment with a security detention of 22 years on appeal in 2009, and to life imprisonment (without security detention) a third time in 2011, after the appeal verdict was overturned by the Court of Cassation on a technicality.
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