A German far-left militant arrested in Berlin after decades on the run was sentenced to 13 years in prison on Wednesday for a series of armed robberies committed while she was a fugitive.
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Daniela Klette, 67, is a former member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, a radical anti-capitalist group that carried out killings, bombings and kidnappings mainly in the 1970s and 1980s.
Klette was arrested in her Berlin apartment in February 2024 after evading the authorities for more than 30 years.
She was found guilty on Wednesday of taking part in a spate of robberies alongside two male gang members to finance their lives on the run after the RAF disbanded in 1998.
In a trial held under tight security, she was found guilty of six counts of “particularly serious robbery” committed between 1999 and 2016, as well as other charges including extortion and arms violations.
The robbers got away with a total of €2.4 million, according to prosecutors.
Klette was accused of having been the getaway driver in several heists and of carrying a “realistic looking” dummy bazooka in robberies where the men carried assault rifles.
Prosecutors also accuse Klette of three politically motivated attacks in the 1990s, while the gang was still active, but those charges are being dealt with in separate proceedings.
Life on the run
The Baader-Meinhof gang, named after two of its early leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, emerged out of the radical fringe of the 1960s and 70s student protest movement.
The group took up arms against what they saw as US imperialism and a “fascist” German state still riddled with former Nazis.
The RAF is believed to have been responsible for 34 deaths, including of police officers, judges, American soldiers and a former Nazi SS officer who later became a prominent industrialist.
A number of sympathisers were in the court’s public gallery on Wednesday, cheering on Klette and shouting “Free Daniela!” with at least one woman led away by security personnel, a journalist with the AFP news agency reported.
In separate proceedings before another court, prosecutors accuse Klette of involvement in an RAF plot to blow up the offices of Deutsche Bank in 1990.
She is also said to have strafed the US embassy in Bonn with machine gun fire in 1991 and to have been part of a team that bombed the Weiterstadt prison near Frankfurt in 1993.
‘Against capitalism and patriarchy’
Klette was part of a trio, along with fellow gang members Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, active as part of the RAF’s “third generation” in the 1980s and 1990s.
Police are still searching for Garweg and Staub, who if still alive would now be 57 and 72 respectively.
“They carried out their robberies with a division of labour and in a highly conspiratorial manner,” said presiding Judge Lars Engelke.
The three had been living in hiding since at least 1999, rented getaway cars under false identities and spoke of the armed robberies as “their work” and source of income, the judge said.
When Klette was arrested, police found a Kalashnikov assault rifle, explosives and large sums of cash in her apartment in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, where she had lived for about 20 years.
Appearing in court last year, Klette remained defiant and vowed to continue the struggle against “capitalism and patriarchy.”
Additional sources • AFP
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