Germany: RAF leftist militant is found guilty

Daniela Klette, allegedly one of the last remaining members of the far-left terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), has been standing trial for her part in a series of armed robberies of supermarkets and cash transporters. She has been found guilty and now faces 13 years in prison.

She has now also been found guilty of kidnapping for ransom and attempted kidnapping for ransom, aggravated robbery, and violations of gun laws. As the verdict was announced, unrest broke out among the approximately 50 spectators in the courtroom, who shouted "Freedom for Daniela."

The court found that Klette committed the crimes together with the fugitive suspected former RAF members Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub to finance their life in hiding. Their targets were armored trucks and cashier offices at large supermarkets; according to the indictment, the total haul amounted to €2.4 million ($2.8 million).

The  67-year-old, who had been living in Berlin under a false identity for more than 30 years, could face yet another trial as federal prosecutors brought additional charges of attempted murder related to attacks dating back to the early 1990s, when the so-called "third generation" of the RAF was at its most active. Any terrorism charges, under which Klette would almost certainly have been charged had she been caught earlier, have passed their statute of limitations.

Caught by AI

Klette was arrested in February 2024, in central Berlin, where police said she had been living as "Claudia Ivone" for some 20 years. It remains unclear how she was able to evade authorities for decades, but Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director at the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) think tank, said that extremist left-wing networks remain notoriously difficult for German police to infiltrate or to gather information on.

Schindler is convinced that several people in Berlin knew her identity, but kept the information to themselves. "There were active investigations against her all the time," Schindler told DW. "Daniela Klette was living a very comfortable double identity because she was protected, because those who knew who she truly was would never speak."

Klette apparently led a normal social life, taking vacations abroad and attending dance and capoeira lessons. She befriended a Brazilian named Ermeson Gomes da Silva, with whom she briefly shared an apartment, though he later told the German media that he did not know her true identity until after her arrest.

It was only in late 2023 that police in Lower Saxony received a tip-off about her apartment in Berlin. In December of that year, a crime podcast asked the Canadian investigative journalist Michael Colborne of the Bellingcat network to use AI facial recognition software to compare 30-year-old photos with newer ones from a Berlin capoeira studio posted on Facebook. Colborne later told the taz newspaper that it barely took him 30 minutes to identify Klette. "I would rather have caught a few fugitive neo-Nazis instead," he said.

On her arrest, which she did not resist, police said they found fake Italian identification documents, as well as several firearms, including a Kalashnikov, a handgun, ammunition, explosives, around €240,000 ($280,000) in cash and several gold bars.

Armed resistance against capitalism

Klette addressed the court herself during the closing statements in mid-May, justifying her actions and apologizing for any trauma caused to cashiers and transporter drivers during the robberies. She also talked about her early activism against the Vietnam War, and how she became radicalized after she concluded that unarmed resistance against capitalism would always be smashed by the state.

She did not, however, confirm that she had actually been a member of the RAF, saying only that the group had "played an important role in her life." She insisted that the German state still knows next to nothing about the final generation of the RAF, "and I hope it stays that way."

"I don't think Klette's role in the overall structure of the RAF has been a particularly important one," said Schindler. This was because, unlike the first two generations of the RAF, which carried out several kidnappings and is thought to be responsible for over 30 murders, it was a diminished force by the mid-1990s. "They really had no clear agenda anymore, their terrorist acts were far less sophisticated, although no less deadly, than those of the prior generations. They lost their direction," Schindler said.

Following the group's formal dissolution in 1998, Schindler said, the remaining members of the group simply became "ordinary criminals" in order to evade justice. "It's really important to understand that this group of individuals never had anything to add to the political debate," he said.

But Klette does enjoy some support in far-left circles in Germany. Posters have popped up in the district of Berlin where she lived, and there have also been demos in solidarity with her in the city during her trial.

In court in mid-May, Klette put her actions in the context of today's protests against militarization, cuts to social services, and Israel's military action in Gaza. "We can only be truly free when everyone is free," she said. A large group of supporters then reportedly jumped to their feet, applauding the defendant, and held up a banner reading "Freedom for Daniela Klette," which was snatched away by court officers.

In the shadow of RAF terror: The children left behind

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A politically-charged trial

"There is no evidence that our client was directly involved in any of the crimes," defense attorney Theune told DW earlier in May. "The fact that she had those things in her apartment showed that she had something to do with them, that she knew the people who did it, but there is no proof that she was there herself."

Theune also said that the trial had been politicized by the state for what is effectively just an armed robbery case. "The images from the court are supposed to symbolize that this is someone extremely dangerous," he said. "Money is no object: At every trial day there were dozens of masked police officers there with machine guns, the entire trial location is surrounded with barbed wire, a whole building was rented out just for her for several million euros."

Theune also alleged that the prosecutors would never have demanded the maximum sentence of 15 years' imprisonment for what he called "a normal trial." "We're concerned that the court will punish her particularly severely, to justify all this expense," he said.

Klette's lawyers are planning to ask the federal court to dismiss the new charges against her altogether, for lack of evidence. These are related to three attacks in the early 1990s — a failed bomb attack on a Deutsche Bank building in Eschborn, some 60 shots fired on the US embassy in Bonn, and the bombing of a prison in 1993, which turned out to be the RAF's last terrorist act. Klette's DNA was found at the scene of all three actions.

"The other accusations pertain to three political actions at the beginning of the 90s, where the evidence against our client is even worse," he said. "There is no one who says that she was part of that, there are just very complex traces of mixed DNA, where there is very little proof that our client left."

Edited by Rina Goldenberg