- By Damien McGuinness
- BBC News, Berlin
February 27, 2024, 15:34 GMT
Updated 30 minutes ago
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Officials say Daniela Klette was part of the RAF's so-called third generation, active in the 1980s and 1990s
The suspected RAF refugee Daniela Klette has been arrested by German police after more than 30 years in hiding.
The 65-year-old was tracked down on Monday evening in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, which is traditionally considered a stronghold of the left.
Ms Klette is known for allegedly being part of the far-left armed group that terrorized Germany for decades.
She is accused of attempted murder and a series of aggravated robberies.
Ms. Klette was flown by helicopter to Bremen, the region where she committed the alleged robberies, and is currently in custody in Verden. Police confirmed her identity using fingerprints. She did not resist arrest. The police found her in November 2023 after a tip from the public.
Officials say they don't yet know how she managed to remain underground for 30 years, whether she was in Germany and who helped her stay undetected. The apartment is now being searched. Police found magazines and ammunition for a handgun in the apartment, but no weapon. Officials call the arrest a milestone in the fight against “terrorism,” saying it shows that “terrorists” can never feel safe, no matter how long ago their crimes occurred.
'Third Generation'
Tabloid headlines about “RAF pensioners” or in English – the “Red Army Faction pensioners” – make the robberies between 1999 and 2016 sound like a TV sitcom about an elderly grandma on the run.
But the now-disbanded RAF – sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof gang – was violent.
Between 1971 and 1993, 34 people were killed. The group targeted political figures and business leaders, and its victims included an attorney general and a CEO of Deutsche Bank.
More than 200 people were injured.
Officials claim Ms Klette was part of the so-called third generation of the RAF, active in the 1980s and 1990s.
The head of Deutsche Bank was reportedly killed by a roadside bomb and a center-left politician tasked with privatizing companies in former communist East Germany was shot dead in his home.
In 1991, the group carried out a gun attack on the US embassy in western Bonn. No one was injured, but traces of Ms. Klette's DNA were later found at the site.
Two years later, the group bombed and partially destroyed a new prison that was being built.
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In 2016, German police released a simulated image of what Daniela Klette (right) and two other wanted people – Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub – would now look like
Hiding in the shadows
The Red Army Faction emerged from the radical student movement of the 1960s. Their goal was to undermine West German capitalism, and the group had ties to guerrillas in the Middle East.
Even today, the RAF is sometimes revered in certain radical left-wing circles. The gang's symbols occasionally appear on clothing and repeatedly trigger heated debates in Germany about whether left-wing extremism and violence are glorified and not taken seriously.
The RAF officially disbanded in 1998 and some members, including Daniela Klette, went underground. Since then, she and two other former RAF members are said to have survived financially by carrying out armed robberies of supermarkets and cash-in-transit trucks. It is believed that they made millions of euros in total.
Police wanted to display posters reading “These people could be your neighbors” and grainy photos of the trio from the 1980s as shaggy-haired students.
More recent police photos of Ms. Klette's two accomplices show gray-haired, middle-aged men. But she appears to have avoided being spotted or photographed, and police photos only show a reconstructed image of what she might look like at age 65.
On February 14, a prosecutor requested information from the public during a true-crime documentary series on national television, and hundreds of people came forward with possible leads.
Somehow Daniela Klette managed to remain in the shadows and undiscovered for half her life, while the search for her ended in vain for decades.