4 months ago
BERLIN: A German activist of the notorious far-left Red Army Faction (RAF) wanted for more than 30 years for attempted murder and other crimes has been arrested in Berlin, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Daniela Klette, 65, was part of a notorious fugitive trio from the RAF, which carried out bombings, kidnappings and killings in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.
Klette was arrested on Monday, a spokesman for prosecutors in Verden said, without giving further details.
Along with fellow RAF members Ernst-Volker Staub and Burhard Garweg, Klette is being investigated by the prosecutors in Verden for attempted murder and various serious robberies between 1999 and 2016.
The trio are believed to have been financing their lives on the run through robberies on money transporters and supermarket cash heists.
The anti-capitalist RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, emerged out of the radicalised fringe of the 1960s student protest movement.
The group, which had links to Middle Eastern militant organisations, declared itself disbanded in 1998.
Staub, Garweg and Klette, alleged members of the RAF’s so-called “third generation” active during the 1980s and 1990s, are the chief suspects in a 1993 explosives attack against a prison under construction in Germany’s Hesse state.
In the attack, five RAF members climbed the prison walls, tied up and abducted the guards in a van, then returned to set off explosions that caused about 600,000 euros worth of property damage, according to German prosecutors.
Klette is also a suspect in two previous RAF operations.
Ten days ago, alarm was raised in Wuppertal when a man on a regional train was mistaken for Staub.
However, it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, and he and Garweg remain on the run. -AFP
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