Daniela Klette, a former terrorist from the German far-left group Red Army Fraction (RAF), was arrested on Monday in Berlin after more than 30 years in search and capture, the Verden Prosecutor’s Office (Lower Saxony) reported in a statement on Tuesday. . Klette, 67, was wanted along with two accomplices Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, all three accused of a bomb attack and attempted murder in 1993 and of robberies of money transport vans between 1999 and 2016. Daniela Klette (Karlsruhe, 1958) was arrested in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg.
Klette, Garweg and Staub are part of the so-called third generation of the RAF, a terrorist organization also called the Baader-Meinhof gang, after the surnames of its two best-known members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who died violent deaths in prison. This anti-capitalist band, co-founded by Baader, Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, left 34 dead and dissolved in 1998 with a simple statement. They attacked above all against the German banking and economic elite.
The third generation of the RAF is accused, among other crimes, of the murders in 1989 of Alfred Herrhausen, president of Deutsche Bank, and in 1991 of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, president of the Treuhand, an institution created after the reunification of Germany to administer and privatize companies from the former communist GDR. Due to the strict law of silence that all members of the RAF have abided by, there are still many doubts about the material responsibility for each of the murders.
Klette, Staub and Garweg vanished after the gang disbanded in 1998. DNA evidence led investigators to the conclusion that the three could be responsible for robberies of cashiers and supermarkets between 1999 and 2016. in cities in the states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, and a bomb attack in 1993 against a penitentiary in Weiterstadt. The genetic trace found in that attack corresponds to the traces left in a 1999 robbery in Duisburg. The Verden Prosecutor’s Office assumes that the robberies were not politically motivated, but that the trio turned to common crime to finance their clandestine life after the RAF disappeared.
