Former Corsican nationalist leader and football club executive Alain Orsoni was killed while attending a family member’s funeral on Monday, France’s anti-organized crime prosecutor, who is overseeing the investigation, said in a statement.
Prosecutors are investigating the incident as a possible murder, the statement read. No arrests have been made as of Tuesday.
Local prosecutor Nicolas Septe told reporters little information was immediately available, apart from the fact that Orsoni had been shot from a distance at his mother’s funeral and died shortly afterward. Orsoni led several political movements in favor of Corsica’s independence in the 1980s and 1990s and was elected to regional office — before leaving the French Mediterranean island for South America in 1996.