Edit of 2:30 p.m.: around 2 p.m., several police and ministerial sources announced the death of Yvan Colonna after his attack. Information then denied by a medical source.
Yvan Colonna, sentenced to life imprisonment for the assassination of the prefect Erignac in Corsica, was violently assaulted on Wednesday by a fellow prisoner. Taken care of in serious condition, he was initially announced dead to the Parisian by several police and ministerial sources. But around 2:30 p.m., a medical source announced that he was still in serious condition. According to our information, he would have been placed on a respirator in intensive care.
Detained in the prison of Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône), he was transferred to the hospital of the same city this Wednesday, seriously injured after being beaten by another prisoner, indicated a little earlier a source police confirming information from BFMTV.
The facts took place in the courtyard, when a detainee, for reasons which are not yet known, violently attacked Yvan Colonna with his bare hands, it was specified from the same source, adding that the judicial police had been seized.
“Degrading treatment” in prison
Yvan Colonna had been found guilty of the assassination of the prefect of Corse-du-Sud, Claude Erignac, perpetrated on February 6, 1998. The Cargèse shepherd had escaped the search of the authorities for several years, before being picked up by the police on July 4, 2003 in Porto-Pollo, near Propriano.
At the end of January, Corsican deputies warned about the conditions of detention of Yvan Colonna, who was subject to special surveillance because of his status as a “specially reported prisoner”. Affirming that he was undergoing “degrading treatment from a legal point of view”, these Corsican nationalist deputies had asked for his transfer to the island in order to bring him closer to his family.