Who stole terrorists brain?

last updated 8 January 2015

Magdeburg, Germany

The brain of Ulrike Meinhof, leader of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, which terrorized Germany in the 1970s, may have been illegally removed for study, prosecutors said this week. Meinhof hanged herself in prison in 1976, after participating in a string of bombings, kidnappings, and killings. Her brain was then examined to determine whether it had any abnormality that could account for her antisocial behavior. It still resides in a box at Magdeburg University. But Meinhof’s daughter, Bettina Röhl, believes her mother did not give permission for her body to be cut up for science, and she wants the brain back. “Even a dead terrorist has a right to be treated fairly,” Röhl wrote in the Magdeburger Volksstimme, “and the right to a decent burial.”