German police arrest long-sought alleged Red Army Faction militant

BERLIN (Reuters): Daniela Klette, a member of Germany’s notorious Red Army Faction (RAF) militant group, has been arrested in Berlin after decades on the run from armed robbery and attempted murder charges, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

The arrest comes after a broadcast two weeks ago on the cold case show Aktenzeichen XY, in which a police appeal for information about three members of the group who are still at large, yielded 250 tips.

Markus Heusler, the prosecutor on the case, confirmed that the woman detained on Monday, now aged 65, was Klette. She, along with the two other remaining fugitives from the gang, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, belong to the group’s so-called third generation.

Founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, among others, the far-left RAF’s first generation committed at least 33 murders of public officials, police, business leaders and US soldiers during its 1970s heyday and took many more hostages.

But the charges facing Klette, along with Garweg and Staub, relate to millions of euros’ worth of armed robberies and at least one attempted murder committed between 1999 and 2016.

The group wound itself up in 1998, sending an anonymous letter to Reuters’ office in Cologne in which the remaining members declared that “city guerilla in the form of the RAF is now history”.