German police arrest former RAF terrorist Daniela Klette in Berlin after more than 30 years in hiding

Former Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist Daniela Klette was detained in an apartment in Berlin without resisting after more than 30 years in hiding. During the operation the police seized magazines and ammunition for a revolver, although there was no weapon. In addition to Klette, who was alone in the apartment at the time of her arrest and who is already in preventive detention, another suspect has been arrested, but her identity has not yet been released. “Her identity still needs to be clarified, it is not yet known with certainty whether her identity document was authentic,” said the president of the Criminal Investigation Office of Lower Saxony, Friedo de Vries.

The 65-year-old woman, wanted among other things for attempted murder, was arrested by the Lower Saxony police on Monday night in an apartment in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg. The flat, located in a seven-storey block, is still being investigated by forensic experts. “With the arrest of a terrorist, who has lived underground for more than 30 years, we are sending a really important signal in the fight against terrorism,” declared the Minister of the Interior of Lower Saxony, Daniela Behrens, during the conference. press. “We show that terrorism is something important and that we continue to investigate tirelessly.”

For the German authorities, Klette’s arrest is a “milestone in German criminal history.” “Daniela Klette is accused of serious crimes and, in view of the large number of violent and unscrupulous robberies that she has allegedly committed, it can be assumed that she continues to represent a latent threat to public safety and order,” explained Behrens. “Terrorists can never feel safe, not even after 30 years, not even after a long time,” he added.

The Prosecutor’s Office reported that it has been investigating Klette and two other former members of the RAF – Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg – since 2015. The trio is accused of attempted murder and a series of violent robberies committed between 1999 and 2016, after of going underground after the dissolution of the RAF in 1998. Klette, Staub and Garweg belong to the so-called third generation of the RAF. Representatives of this generation would have murdered the then CEO of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, and the acting head of the Treuhand, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder.

RAF pensioners

The crime scenes were located in Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. The Prosecutor’s Office assumes that the robberies were not politically motivated. The trio, on the run for more than 30 years, would have tried to finance their clandestine life with robberies. Today, they are known as “the RAF pensioners.”

More recently, on February 14, the Verden Prosecutor’s Office requested information about former RAF terrorists in a program on the German channel ZDF. A few days later, a false alarm occurred when a man traveling on a regional train in Wuppertal was mistaken for former RAF member Ernst-Volker Staub. However, last November, a citizen gave information that turned out to be decisive in his arrest.

Klette, who had been using a false identity for decades, was identified thanks to her fingerprints. A foreign passport under another name was found in the apartment. However, the woman never denied being Daniela Klette, as confirmed by the Verden Prosecutor’s Office. At the moment, the authorities have not been able to clarify how she managed to live so many years in hiding, or what help she received. Klette lived in an apartment block on Sebastianstrasse in Kreuzberg. According to a neighbor told the German media, she lived there under the name Claudia and to earn money, she would have given private mathematics classes. The neighbor indicated that he had spoken with Klette often and even received cookies from her as a Christmas gift. However, she maintained only superficial contact with her neighbors, many of whom now admitted to being “surprised” that the old woman with the gray hair ponytail was a former terrorist.

The arrest of the former terrorist reaffirms the Berlin Police Union (GdP) in its opinion that a network of left-wing extremists exists. “The fact that the wanted woman was in Kreuzberg is further proof that Berlin remains a bastion of a well-connected left-wing extremist scene nationally and globally,” the GdP declared shortly after the news was released.

The RAF violently fought against the so-called “imperialist system” of the Federal Republic of Germany for more than 20 years. From 1971 to 1993, terrorists murdered 34 people, including representatives of the business and political world such as the federal attorney general, Siegfried Buback, and the president of the employers’ association, Hanns Martin Schleyer. More than 200 people were injured by the organization.

The last RAF attack took place in March 1993 with an explosive attack on the construction sites of the Weiterstadt prison. More than 200 kilograms of explosives destroyed three accommodation buildings and the administrative wing of the prison under construction. There were no injuries, but the material damage amounted to a total of 80 to 90 million German marks (between 40 and 45 million euros). In April 1998, the RAF announced its dissolution.

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