French court orders partial release of Corsican nationalist convicted of murder

A Paris court this week ordered the partial release of Pierre Alessandri, who has served 24 years in jail for the 1998 assassination of Corsica's top regional official Claude Erignac.

Pierre Alessandri, 64, has spent almost twenty-four years in prison. He was sentenced in July 2003 to life behind bars for his part in the assassination of Claude Erignac on 6 February 1998 in Ajaccio.

The Paris appeals court granted Alessandri a probationary partial release of 12 months from 13 February, the prosecutor-general Remy Heitz announced.

Alessandri could then be granted "conditional release" for another ten years, Heitz said.

Under the ruling, Alessandri will be allowed to work for a landscaping company.

The relaxation of the Corsican nationalist's conditions of detention came amid tensions between Corsica's pro-autonomy leaders and the French state, after Yvan Colonna, a fellow Corsican detained in the same case, was murdered in a French prison in March.

Alessandri and a third Corsican detainee Alain Ferrandi, sentenced to life in jail in 2003 in connection with the murder, were transferred from mainland France to a jail in Corsica in April after the murder of Colonna.

Ferrandi has also asked to be released on parole, and a decision is due on 23 February.

'A strong symbolic significance'

Alessandri's lawyer Eric Barbolosi hailed the ruling as a "great relief".

"For the first time in a court of appeals, the magistrates made a decision based on the criteria necessary for a conditional release, not the particular nature of the case," he said.

In a press release published on Tuesday, Gilles Simeoni, the president of Corsica's local government, the Executive Council, stressed that the decision had "a strong symbolic significance, a few days before the 25th anniversary of the assassination of the prefect Claude Erignac.

"The time has come, without forgetting any of the facts, and with respect for the memory of the victim and the pain of his family, to open a new page in relations between Corsica and the State," Simeoni added.

France's Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin is due to visit Corsica on 6 February, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of the prefect Erignac in Ajaccio.

(With AFP)