After 30 years, Germany arrests fugitive member of Baader Meinhoff gang
Daniela Klette has been on the run for decades with two other members of Marxist faction that previously teamed up with Palestinian terrorists
A German Red Army Faction terrorist wanted for more than 30 years for attempted murder and other crimes has been arrested in Berlin, a spokesman for the public prosecution service in the town of Verden said on Tuesday.
Daniela Klette, 65, was part of a notorious fugitive trio of members of the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader Meinhoff Gang, which carried out bombings, kidnappings, and killings in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.
Authorities said they were attempting to confirm that the person arrested in Berlin on Tuesday was Klette, who has been on the run for decades from armed robbery charges after she and two other members of the group perpetrated a series of robberies to fund their retirement from the group.
The arrest follows a nationwide broadcast in Germany two weeks ago of cold case show “Aktenzeichen XY,” in which police appealed for information about the three members of the group who were still at large.
“We are working on identifying the person,” said an official familiar with the case.
The charges on which the three — Klette, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub — are sought relate to armed robberies and at least one attempted murder committed between 1999 and 2016, not the stream of political attacks committed by the group from the 1970s onwards.
The RAF emerged in 1970 out of the radical fringe of the Vietnam war protest movement and took up arms, in solidarity with revolutionaries such as Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, against what it saw as US capitalist imperialism and a German state then still riddled with former Nazis.
After training with leftist Palestinian terrorists, it launched a spate of attacks targeting politicians, police, bankers, business leaders, and US troops.
In October of 1977, the RAF teamed up with terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who hijacked a German plane, holding the passengers hostage and demanding the release of 11 RAF members from prison.
After a five-day chase in which the terrorists only landed the plane for refueling and killed the pilot, German commandos were able to launch a rescue operation in Mogadishu, killing all four terrorists and saving the rest of the passengers and surviving crew members.
The organization killed a total of 34 people and injured hundreds. It declared itself disbanded in 1998.
