Masked gunmen warn tourists to stay away from popular holiday hotspot
Armed Corsican nationalists compared French second-home owners to “rampant settlement-driven colonisation”
Gun-wielding Corsican nationalists have issued a chilling warning to tourists ordering them to "stay away" from the island.
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Sinister footage shows a group of unidentifiable armed soldiers clad in balaclavas and all-black clothing stood in front of a white sign bearing the letters FLNC (the National Liberation Front of Corsica).
The masked nationalists made the alarming warning via a secret press conference to which only one media outlet was invited, Corse Matin.
Through distorted audio, they said: “Until our national rights are recognised and respected, we have only one message for them: stay at home.
“The Corsican people will never be a vulgar administrative community.”
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Corsica - an island in the Mediterranean lying 105 miles which is part of France - has a population of 365,000.
Over the last ten years, the island's population has grown by 32,900 or an average of one per cent a year, according to the country’s statistics office INSEE.
Roughly three million tourists visit Corsica a year, of whom around 300,000 are Brits.
The combatants, wielding machine guns and rifles, also attacked the 5,000 foreigners, “the vast majority of whom are French”, who buy second-homes on the island or move there to work.
They likened what they called “rampant settlement-driven colonisation” to “a weapon of mass dilution that colonialism has always used against the peoples it seeks to subjugate, or even wipe out”.
The island is adored by billionaires and celebrities. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich owns a home on Corsica, while Mick Jagger and Bill Gates have been known to holiday there.
Corsican separatism has been a live movement since the 1970s, with the FLNC forming in 1976.
The group is ramping up its opposition to a proposed constitutional bill granting autonomous status for the island within France.
They claim the status does not go far enough towards full independence and does not recognise the seperate identity of the Corsican people.
Corsica became part of France in 1768 when it was gifted by the Republic of Genoa to King Louis XV.