Hundreds of Yvan Colonna supporters rally in the main Corsican cities of Ajaccio, Calvi and Bastia with the protests rapidly degenerating into clashes.
Violent clashes have broken out between protesters and police on France’s Mediterranean island of Corsica over the assault in prison on a nationalist figure.
Yvan Colonna, who is serving a life sentence for the assassination in 1998 of Corsica’s top regional official Claude Erignac, is currently in a coma after being beaten on March 2 in jail by a fellow detainee serving time for “terror” offences.
The incident has stoked anger on the island where some still see Colonna – who was arrested only in 2003 after a five-year manhunt that eventually found him living as a shepherd in the Corsican mountains – as a hero in a fight for independence.
Hundreds demonstrated overnight on Thursday in the main Corsican cities of Ajaccio, Calvi and Bastia with the protests rapidly degenerating into clashes with security forces, according to the AFP news agency.
Protesters gather in Corte during a rally in support of Yvan Colonna [Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/AFP]
In Ajaccio, protesters even broke into the main justice building, setting fire to scrap papers. They then went on to ransack a bank.
Local authorities said 14 people were wounded in Ajaccio alone, including a journalist for France’s TF1 TV channel who was hurt in the leg.
Special status detainee
Colonna was jailed in the south of France with authorities long rejecting his demand to be transferred to Corsica, saying his offence made him a special status detainee.
In a bid to ease tensions, Prime Minister Jean Castex on Tuesday removed this status, but the move was seen as too little too late by Colonna’s supporters in Corsica.
French prosecutors have charged Colonna’s alleged jail assailant, Franck Elong Abe, with attempted murder in association with “a terror group”.
According to France’s top anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard, Franck Elong Abe had confessed to the attack, saying he had been angered by “blasphemous statements” made by Colonna while behind bars.
