Burkhard Garweg, Ernst-Volker Staub and Daniela Klette, the RAF members who have been wanted for decades. Bottom: computer photos distributed in 2016. — © EPA
A former terrorist from the German Red Army Faction (RAF), Daniela Klette (65), was arrested in Berlin on Monday evening. The Public Prosecution Service has announced this. Klette had lived in hiding for decades. She was part of the so-called third generation of the RAF.
The RAF was a left-wing extremist terrorist group founded in the early 1970s that was responsible for more than 30 murders and also committed a series of bank robberies and bombings. The RAF disbanded in 1998, but three former members, including Klette, continued to commit robberies. These are Burkhard Garweg (55), Ernst-Volker Staub (69) and Daniela Klette.
The Public Prosecution Service in Verden and the State Criminal Investigation Department of Lower Saxony have been looking for the three for decades. They accuse them of attempted murder and a series of serious robberies between 1999 and 2016. The Public Prosecution Service assumes that the robberies were not politically motivated. The suspects are said to have committed the crimes to obtain money.
On February 14, the Public Prosecution Service in Verden requested information about former RAF terrorists in the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY… ungelöst”, about unsolved cases.
Attack on embassy
The third generation of the RAF is said to have murdered the then head of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, and the head of Treuhandanstalt, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder. The Treuhandanstalt was a West German organization that had to privatize East German companies after the fall of the Wall.
Rohwedder was shot dead behind his desk in his home in Düsseldorf on April 1, 1991. The RAF commando targeted him from a garden more than 60 meters away. It was the RAF’s last assassination attempt.
Klette is also suspected of involvement in an attack on the United States embassy in Bonn on February 13, 1991, during the Second Gulf War.