The Red Army Faction: German fugitive arrested after decades on run

An alleged Red Army Faction fugitive has been arrested by German police after more than 30 years in hiding.

Daniela Klette was one of three former Red Army Faction (RAF) members linked to 12 robberies in northern Germany between 1999 and 2016, as well as attempted murder.

The background

The group, which was also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, emerged from German student protests in the 1960s against the Vietnam War. Following a Marxist-Leninist ideology, it launched a campaign against US imperialism and capitalism's treatment of workers. Their actions have been interpreted in part as "their generation's angry reaction" to their parents' and grandparents' "apparent complicity in the Nazi era", said The Guardian.

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German tabloid headlines about "RAF Rentner", which translates to "Red Army Faction pensioners", make the robberies between 1999 and 2016 "sound like a TV sitcom about an elderly grandma on the run", said the BBC. But the now-disbanded group was violent, killing 34 people between 1971 and 1993.

Its victims, said The Guardian, "included the Dresdner Bank boss Jürgen Ponto, the Deutsche Bank chair Alfred Herrhausen" and the "senior West German diplomat Gerold von Braunmühl".

Women were always prominent in the RAF. As soon as the group "burst onto the West German scene", women "have been its face", with images of "violent female radicals" filling "tabloids and wanted posters during RAF's heyday", wrote Elizabeth Heineman on Wellesley Centers for Women. 

The latest

Klette had been in hiding in Berlin for 20 years, said Bild, and neighbours said she went by the name of Claudia. Her arrest came after "Aktenzeichen XY", the German equivalent of the BBC's "Crimewatch", recently profiled Klette and two other members of the third generation of the organisation.

Police offered a reward of €150,000 (£128,000) for any information leading to the whereabouts of the three and the programme led to "250 tipoffs", said The Guardian.

Klette, now 65, was tracked down on Monday evening in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. "Heavily armed" police officers apprehended her in a rental apartment in a "plain, beige" eight-storey building "on a street where the Berlin Wall stood during the Cold War", said The New York Times.

She did not resist arrest and police confirmed her identity using fingerprints. She was flown by helicopter to Bremen, in the region where she committed the alleged robberies, and is now in pre-trial detention in Verden.

A second person has also been arrested. His identity has not been confirmed but he appears to be in the same age range as Klette's robbery accomplices. He was carrying fake ID.

An apartment has been searched, where police found ammunition for a handgun but no weapon. Authorities believe the motive for the robberies was to support their lives underground rather than out of a direct political motive.

The reaction

Officials have described the arrest as a milestone in the fight against terrorism and say it proves that terrorists can never feel safe no matter how long ago they offended.

Friedo de Vries, president of Lower Saxony's state police, said that "despite various setbacks, we always believed that sooner or later we would be successful".

But the arrests could prove divisive, as the RAF is "sometimes revered in certain radical-left wing circles" even today, said the BBC. The gang's symbols "occasionally crop up on clothing", prompting "anguished debates" about whether left-wing extremism and violence is "glamorised, rather than taken seriously".