Former member of German militant group jailed for armed robberies after 30 years on the run

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A former member of the German militant group Red Army Faction (RAF) has been jailed for 13 years for carrying out a string of armed robberies between 1999 and 2016.

Daniela Klette, 67, was finally caught in a flat in Berlin in 2024 after more than 30 years on the run. She went on trial last year.

Her defence had called for her acquittal but the court in Verden in Lower Saxony found her guilty on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, violating weapons laws and other offences over a 17-year period.

The RAF, a violent anti-capitalist group also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was eventually disbanded after a campaign of murder, kidnapping and bombing from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

The court found Klette had robbed supermarkets and armoured vans along with two other former members of the RAF faction, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, who have not yet been caught.

Dozens of Klette's supporters booed the guilty verdict in court, chanting "freedom for Daniela".

According to Hans-Jakob Schindler, head of the Counter Extremism Project, she has become "a kind of grandmother heroine for the extreme left in Berlin".

Klette did not explicitly admit to being an RAF member during the trial, and Schindler told the BBC she would never face trial for terrorism allegations against her from that period because of the statute of limitations.

However, she could still face a further trial, as federal prosecutors allege she was complicit in three of the group's attacks.

The trial focused on eight robberies across northern and western Germany, beginning in the city of Duisburg in July 1999, when masked attackers rammed a cash transport van and threatened the guards with guns and a grenade-launcher, before making off with a large sum of money.

The final raid, in June 2016, was on an armoured transport van near the city of Braunschweig. The robbers seized almost €1.4m (£1.2m).

Klette was not caught until February 2024 after a tip-off to police. She had been living on Sebastianstrasse in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin - a quiet street that was once divided by the Berlin Wall - under an assumed name and with a foreign passport.

She was moved to Lower Saxony, where many of the robberies had taken place, to stand trial.

Although Klette had been on the run for decades, prosecutors said she made no attempt to hide her identity.

Hamza, one of her neighbours in Berlin, described how he would see her walking her dog in Berlin. She seemed friendly and would say hello, Hamza told the BBC, adding that he was shocked when he found out about her past.

Klette had been using the name Claudia for years but was tracked down by an investigative journalist using AI facial recognition software and matching an image from an old wanted poster to recent pictures from the internet.

A police search uncovered weapons, ammunition, a replica rocket-propelled grenade, wigs, false IDs, gold and €240,000 in cash.

BKA/Interpol

Klette's defence lawyers always argued there was no evidence she was involved in the robberies themselves, maintaining the only offence she had committed related to weapons in her flat.

Although her membership of the RAF is beyond the statute of limitations, federal prosecutors have filed charges, alleging Klette's involvement in three of the militant group's later attacks.

They accuse her of complicity in a failed bombing in front of a Deutsche Bank building in 1990, a 1991 shooting in which the US embassy in Bonn was hit by at least 57 bullets, and a 1993 bombing at a prison.

Klette is alleged to have played a part in the third and final generation of the RAF, which killed 34 people between 1970 and 1991.

Some of its most notorious crimes took place in 1977, when a federal prosecutor was shot dead and leading industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer was kidnapped and eventually killed.

A decision on whether Klette will face a further trial rests with authorities in Frankfurt.

There has been no trace of the two remaining RAF fugitives, Staub and Garweg.

"They could still be here, they could be abroad," Hans-Jakob Schindler told the BBC. "I guess they have learned the lesson not to put any pictures of themselves online."