27-2-2024 (BERLIN) Daniela Klette, a member of the infamous Red Army Faction militant group, was apprehended in Berlin after evading armed robbery and attempted murder charges for decades, prosecutors revealed on Tuesday.
The arrest follows a recent police appeal for information on three remaining Red Army Faction (RAF) fugitives during a popular TV crime show, which generated 250 tip-offs.
Markus Heusler, the prosecutor handling the case, confirmed the arrest of 65-year-old Klette on Monday. She, along with the two other fugitives, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, constitutes the group’s “third generation.”
According to Der Spiegel newspaper, ammunition was discovered in the Berlin apartment block in the central Kreuzberg district where Klette was taken into custody.
Founded in 1970 by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, among others, the first generation of the far-left RAF emerged from German student protests against the Vietnam War.
During its peak in the 1970s, the group took hostages and was responsible for the murder of at least 33 people, including public officials, police officers, business leaders, and US soldiers. It was also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
The charges against Klette, Garweg, and Staub pertain to armed robberies totaling millions of euros and at least one attempted murder committed between 1999 and 2016. Notably, these crimes were not carried out in the name of the RAF, as the group officially disbanded in 1998. In an anonymous letter sent to Reuters’ office in Cologne, the remaining members declared that “the urban guerrilla group in the form of the RAF is now history.”
