A few hours before his arrival in Corsica, the scene of violence for two weeks, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin returned for the Corse-Matin newspaper to the trigger: the attack on Yvan Colonna by a co-detainee . “From what I understood, (…), it is a manifestly terrorist act (…), as we know of on the national territory”, he believes. An act “whose object would have been blasphemy” clarified Gérald Darmanin, referring to Samuel Paty, this teacher beheaded in 2020 in the Paris region for having shown caricatures of Muhammad in progress to his students.
Asked about the reason for this comparison, the minister explained that he found “excessive, not to say unbearable, the words of state crime” referred to in this Colonna case, “while we are faced with a terrorist act”. “When Samuel Paty is assassinated, we do not qualify this attack as a state crime”, insisted Gérald Darmanin: “the idea that the State would be behind, in organizing the death of Yvan Colonna, is insulting and deeply contrary to the truth”, even if all this “does not absolutely mean that there have not been unacceptable malfunctions”.
Mea culpa on the lifting of DPS status, “perceived as a provocation”
The Minister acknowledged that the lifting of the status of “particularly reported detainee” of Colonna, imprisoned for life for the murder of the prefect Erignac, while he has been in a coma since his attack, “was perceived as a provocation”. But the tenant of Place Beauvau maintained that it was “a measure of humanity”, intended in particular to facilitate the visits of his relatives to the Marseille hospital where he is followed: “it was necessary to explain more, whose act, mea culpa”.
Nor is there any question for the minister to admit that it was the demonstrations and the tension in Corsica that would have pushed the government to lift the DPS status of Pierre Alessandri and Alain Ferrandi, two other members of the “Erignac commando”: “I believe that it’s wrong, (it was) in the order of things”, and their rapprochement in a Corsican prison “had already been recorded, the question was only that of timing”, he assured. For the reconciliation of these two detainees in Corsica, Gérald Darmanin insisted on “a prerequisite, which is the return to calm”: “it cannot be the street which commands”, he hammered.