Spiegel magazine called it one of the most remarkable successes in the hunt for criminals in Germany in a long time. The Minister of the Interior of Lower Saxony, Daniela Behrens, even spoke of a “milestone” in the history of German criminal science.
“Terrorists can never feel safe. We do not forget them. We are tirelessly continuing the search,” she said.
Such comments followed Monday’s success when German police arrested terrorist and former country member of the left-wing Red Army Faction, Daniela Klette. She escaped justice for 30 years.
We don’t know if she felt safe during that time or not, but she certainly didn’t try to hide her face from the world. Although she had a different identity – an Italian passport under the name Claudia Ivone – she lived for 20 years in a rented apartment in the Kreuzberg district in the center of Berlin, just a few kilometers from the seat of the German government.
She tutored the children in mathematics, went to the neighbor across the street for coffee, cleaned up the garbage around her neighborhood, went dancing. Neighbors said she was nice and talked to them normally. None of them could have imagined that the gray-haired 65-year-old woman had behind her a bomb attack on a German prison in 1993 or was suspected of participating in a sniper attack on the American embassy in Bonn in 1991.
Even journalists found her
The German police were apparently not the first to discover her new identity after 30 years. Her new identity was independently discovered by German journalists together with a Canadian colleague.
Last year, journalists from ARD received a tip in their podcast from a listener that a certain woman from Cologne could be Daniela Kletteová. The man sent them a photo.
Journalists from the podcast subsequently contacted Michael Colborne, a Canadian journalist from the investigative portal Bellingcat. He did a simple thing:
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