Alain Orsoni in Paris, May 1, 2006. STÉPHANE LAVOUÉ/PASCO&CO
The latest murder is irrefutable evidence of the criminal grip on Corsica and a spectacular challenge to the authorities tasked with maintaining order. While the entire judicial hierarchy and the highest-ranking police and gendarmerie officials on the island gathered on Monday, January 12, in Bastia for the formal opening of a new appeals court, Alain Orsoni, a key figure in the island's nationalist history, was killed at his mother's funeral in the family village of Vero, in the south of the island. The newly created National Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime immediately joined the case, alongside the Marseille-based interregional force specializing in the fight against criminal gangs.
Shortly after 4:30 pm, before the gathered family, the priest was conducting the final rites of Orsoni's mother's burial. Then, according to Ajaccio Prosecutor Nicolas Septe, Orsoni stepped slightly aside before suddenly collapsing. The prosecutor said the victim had been fatally shot from a long distance of "several hundred meters" and that only one bullet appeared to have been shot. By late afternoon, before nightfall, investigators from the judicial police were trying to pinpoint the precise location in the surrounding vegetation from which the fatal shot had been fired.
