German police arrest Red Army Faction suspect Daniela Klette
German police officers stand in front of the building where Daniela Klette was detained. PHOTO/COURTESY: CNN
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Daniela
Klette, a member of Germany’s notorious Red Army Faction (RAF) militant group,
has been arrested in Berlin after decades on the run from armed robbery and
attempted murder charges, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
The
arrest comes after a broadcast two weeks ago on the cold case show Aktenzeichen
XY, in which a police appeal for information about three members of the group
who are still at large, yielded 250 tips.
Markus
Heusler, the prosecutor on the case, confirmed that the woman detained on Monday,
now aged 65, was Klette.
She,
along with the two other remaining fugitives from the gang, Burkhard Garweg and
Ernst-Volker Staub, belong to the group’s so-called third generation.
Founded
by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, among others, the far-left RAF’s first
generation committed at least 33 murders of public officials, police, business
leaders and US soldiers during its 1970s heyday and took many more hostages.
The
charges facing Klette, along with Garweg and Staub, relate to millions of
euros’ worth of armed robberies and at least one attempted murder committed
between 1999 and 2016.
But
these crimes were not committed in RAF’s name: the group wound itself up in
1998, sending an anonymous letter to Reuters’ office in Cologne in which the
remaining members declared that “the urban guerrilla group in the form of the
RAF is now history.”


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