PARIS, Jan 12 (Reuters) – Former Corsican separatist leader Alain Orsoni was shot dead during his mother’s funeral on Monday in Vero, a village 30 km (18.6 miles) east of Ajaccio, the capital of the Mediterranean French island, the city’s public prosecutor said.
“He was hit by a long-range shot,” prosecutor Nicolas Septe, told Reuters. Local police confirmed the assassination.
Orsoni, 71, led a separatist movement called the Corsican Movement for Self-Determination, which French police considered to be the legal front for the armed group, the Corsican National Liberation Front-Traditional Wing.
Authorities linked the Corsican National Liberation Front-Traditional Wing to a series of attacks on the island in the 1990s, some of which the group claimed.
Orsoni was also charged, convicted and later pardoned in connection with a machine gun attack on the Iranian embassy in Paris in 1980.
Orsoni was also the president of Corsican soccer club AC Ajaccio in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
(Reporting by Marc Leras, writing by Louise Rasmussen, editing by Inti Landauro and Sharon Singleton)
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