Special police forces took a man off a train at Wuppertal Central Station and arrested him because an eyewitness mistook him for a wanted ex-RAF terrorist. The Wuppertal police announced on Saturday evening that the suspicion that it was Ernst-Volker Staub had not been confirmed.
Since it could not be ruled out that the man posed a possible danger, special forces were deployed and surrounded a train. They arrested the suspicious man and a female companion to establish their identities. “The initial suspicions about the man’s identity were not confirmed,” the police said afterwards. The man and his companion were then immediately released. The program “Case number XY … unsolved” launched a new search call for three ex-RAF terrorists who are still wanted on Wednesday.
The police had completely closed Wuppertal main station for the arrest. Initially it was said that the reason was a “safety disruption on the track”. It was announced on one of the affected trains that an explosive device had been found. But the police had not confirmed this.
There were delays in rail traffic, affecting the route between Hagen and Cologne and Düsseldorf. Several long-distance trains were affected by the disruption and rail traffic was rerouted.
After the program “Case number The Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office will now evaluate this information.
The accused Ernst-Volker Staub, Daniela Marie Luise Klette and Burkhard Garweg are accused, among other things, of attempted murder and a series of serious robberies. The three went into hiding in the 1990s. DNA evidence led investigators to the conclusion that the three could be responsible for robberies of cash transport and supermarkets between 1999 and 2016.
Crime scenes included Osnabrück, Wolfsburg and Stuhr in Lower Saxony as well as Hagen and Bochum-Wattenscheid in North Rhine-Westphalia. The public prosecutor’s office assumes that the attacks were not politically motivated. The accused are said to have committed the crimes in order to get money.
The left-wing extremist organization Red Army Faction (RAF) was considered the epitome of terror and murder in the Federal Republic for decades. In total, the RAF murdered more than 30 people and more than 200 were injured. Victims included Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback, Dresdner Bank boss Jürgen Ponto and employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer. The RAF disbanded in 1998.
Dust, burdock and Garweg are assigned to the so-called third RAF generation. Representatives of the generation are said to have killed the then head of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, and the head of the Treuhand, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder.
Note: This article has been extensively updated following the police announcement and additional information has been added.
