Corsican protesters clash with police in anger over attack on jailed nationalist
- There were 38 people injured in the ongoing clashes, including 24 police officers, the prefecture said
- The violent protest is the latest demonstration over an attack on Corsican Yvan Colonna, who is being held at a prison in mainland France for a 1998 murder
Protesters in the northern Corsican town of Bastia attacked public buildings and threw projectiles at police on Sunday in the latest demonstration over an attack on a jailed nationalist at a mainland French prison.
A protest that gathered 7,000 people in the midafternoon turned violent as around 300 hooded individuals used Molotov cocktails and other projectiles to target police and state institutions, setting fire to a public tax office, the local prefecture said in a statement.
There were 38 injured in the ongoing clashes, including 24 police officers, the prefecture said in an update at 8pm local time.
There have been a number of demonstrations on the island of Corsica in the past week, including some clashes with police, in outrage over the strangling of Yvan Colonna by a fellow inmate at a prison in southern France.
The attack left the Corsican militant in a coma and led to renewed calls for nationalist prisoners to be transferred from the French mainland to the island.
Colonna is serving a life sentence for the 1998 murder of Claude Erignac, who as prefect of Corsica embodied the power of the French state on an island with a history of separatist violence.
