After decades on the run, Daniela Klette, who was wanted internationally as an RAF terrorist, was arrested in Berlin. The 65-year-old suspected former member of the command level of the left-wing extremist Red Army Faction (RAF) was caught there on Monday, said a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office in Verden, Lower Saxony. The authority initially did not provide any details.
The Verden public prosecutor’s office is investigating Klette and two other fugitive suspected former RAF members, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, for attempted murder and various attempted and completed serious robberies between 1999 and 2016. The trio, who had been on the run for more than 30 years, are said to have financed their underground lives through the attacks. Investigators see no evidence of current terrorist activity. The RAF dissolved itself in 1998.
“We have an arrest of Ms. Klette,” said Verden senior public prosecutor Koray Freudenberg. However, he still has no idea who and where exactly she was arrested. According to a report in “Spiegel” on Tuesday, the wanted person was identified through fingerprints and apparently used an Italian passport.
The magazine continued that she was caught by Lower Saxony investigators in an apartment building in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. According to his information, Klette did not resist the arrest. The investigators found ammunition in the apartment. There has been a public search for burdock, dust and Garweg for a long time at home and abroad; the investigators last addressed the population again around two weeks ago in the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY … unsolved”. At the same time, they said they also specifically contacted the families of those they were looking for and former RAF supporters. A reward of 150,000 euros was offered for information leading to the arrest.
Ten days ago, in connection with the search for the trio, there was a false alarm at the train station in Wuppertal in North Rhine-Westphalia. There, a man on a regional train was mistaken for dust, which was followed by a large-scale operation involving special forces, among others. Staub, Garweg and Burdock are said to have belonged to the so-called third generation of the RAF. The left-wing extremist group caused terror in the Federal Republic of Germany, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, with more than 30 murders. Their victims included business leaders such as the former employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer and the former Federal Prosecutor General Jürgen Ponto.
The so-called third generation of the RAF was active in the 1980s and committed deadly attacks – including a bomb attack on former Deutsche Bank boss Alfred Herrhausen. She also carried out, among other things, explosive attacks on US military installations in Germany. In 1998, the RAF declared itself dissolved after years of widespread inactivity. There is no evidence that it is still active.
Burdock, dust and dirt remained underground. In 2016, DNA traces linked them to robberies on money transporters and supermarkets in northern Germany and moved high up on the wanted lists. The investigators from the Verden public prosecutor’s office therefore started extensive research and contacted the public several times, for example with recordings from surveillance cameras.
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe is conducting the investigation into suspected previous terrorist activities by the RAF. She is investigating the three suspects, among other things, for their involvement in a bomb attack on a prison under construction in Weiterstadt in Hesse in 1993. Klette is also said to have been involved in an RAF attack on the US embassy in the then federal capital of Bonn in 1991 . The building was shot at, but there were no injuries at the time.
