Daniela Klette, a member of Germany’s notorious Red Army Faction militant group, has been arrested in Berlin after decades on the run from armed robbery and attempted murder charges, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
The arrest comes after a police appeal for information about three Red Army Faction (RAF) fugitives on a popular TV crime show two weeks ago that yielded 250 tip-offs.
Markus Heusler, the prosecutor on the case, confirmed that Klette, 65, was arrested on Monday. She, along with the two other remaining fugitives from the gang, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, belong to the group’s so-called third generation.
Der Spiegel reported that police found ammunition in the apartment block in Berlin’s central Kreuzberg district where Klette was detained.
Founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof among others, the far-left RAF’s first generation emerged from German student protests against the Vietnam War.
The group took hostages and murdered at least 33 people, including public officials, police officers, business leaders and U.S. soldiers, during the height of its activity in the 1970s.
The charges facing Klette, along with Garweg and Staub, relate to millions of euros’ worth of armed robberies and at least one attempted murder committed between 1999 and 2016.
But these crimes were not committed in RAF’s name: the group wound itself up in 1998, sending an anonymous letter to Reuters’ office in Cologne in which the remaining members declared that “the urban guerrilla group in the form of the RAF is now history”.
(Reuters, Photo from Associated Press)
