The day of Thursday was placed under the sign of contemplation in Ajaccio, in Corsica. In the Picchetti funeral space, hundreds of people crowded around the coffin of independence activist Yvan Colonna. Covered with the bandera, the Corsican flag, and roses, it was placed in the middle of candles, baskets of white flowers and two youth portraits of the former shepherd of Cargèse. He is to be buried on Friday, in his village.
It is the child of the country whom the people who parade come to greet, without dwelling on the fact that this same man was sentenced three times to life imprisonment for the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac, killed several times bullets, some of them in the head, in 1998, in Ajaccio. Questioned by journalists, Gilles Simeoni, president of the Collectivity of Corsica, thus refuses to expand on the controversy about the flags at half mast in Corsica. “We respect death. It’s cultural”, only dropped the elected autonomist, surrounded by several other representatives of the local political class.
Yvan Colonna’s 10-year-old son present
Nearby, Christine and Stéphane, sister and brother of Yvan Colonna, receive messages of support, in the presence of the two children of the deceased, including his 10-year-old son, seated next to the coffin. “We want justice to be done for Yvan and the guy to be judged harshly,” insists Yvan Colonna’s mother-in-law, Santa Casasoprana, holding back tears: “It’s sad to die like that. No one deserved this death. »
“My grandson, the poor, he is very sad”: the last time he saw his father, “he was eight years old, it was two years ago”, “because of the Covid”, adds the mother of Stéphanie Colonna, who had married the member of the “commando Erignac” in prison.
The burial will take place Friday afternoon, in Cargèse (Corse du Sud), family stronghold of the Colonna, a hamlet of 1,300 inhabitants in the west of the island. Father Antoine Forget, known as Father “Tony”, of the Latin church in the village, which also has a Byzantine rite parish, said that a deacon brother would say a few words about the deceased. If a large crowd is expected, only 150 people will be able to slip into the church, said the priest.