On Monday, Daniela Klette, 65, a member of the notorious German militant group the Red Army Faction (RAF) who had been on the run for decades, was arrested in Berlin on charges of several armed robberies and attempted murder, on Tuesday the 27th of February, reports Reuters.
Klette was wanted along with two other members of the group, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg – all three third and last generation members of the militant group are suspected of a string of crimes committed between 1999 and 2016 to maintain their fugitive lifestyle.
Police managed to detain Klette on Monday evening in an apartment in Berlin’s central Kreuzberg district.
She did not show any resistance during her detention, as confirmed by Friedo de Vries, head of the Lower Saxony Criminal Investigation Division. At the end of the briefing, de Vries said that another arrest had been made in Berlin but indicated that the identity of the detainee had not yet been confirmed.
In November, following a tip from the public, the police stepped up their efforts to apprehend the RAF fugitives and two weeks ago a popular crime TV programme called on the public to provide any information on the RAF fugitives, after which a further 250 different tips were submitted, which the police are still processing.
Daniela Behrens, Minister of the Interior of Lower Saxony, said that terrorists cannot feel safe even after 30 years and terrorism will be fought with all legal means.
In an apartment block in Berlin, Klette was found alone, and police seized a gun, two magazines and cartridges. She was later taken by helicopter to a prison in the northern city of Bremen.
The RAF’s first far-left generation, founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof among others, started at a time when German students were protesting the Vietnam War.
At the height of its activities in the 1970s, the group took hostages and killed at least 33 people, including government officials, police officers, businessmen and US soldiers.
But the crimes of the third generation were not committed in the name of the RAF: in 1998, the group officially ceased operations, announcing its disbandment in an anonymous letter sent to the Reuters office in Cologne.
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