Prosecutors on Wednesday called for a former member of Germany’s far-left Red Army Faction militant group to be sentenced to 15 years in jail for a series of armed robberies said to have been carried out to support herself while she was on the run.
Prosecutors accuse Daniela Klette, 67, of carrying out eight attacks between 1999 and 2016 alongside two other former Red Army Faction (RAF) members.
The suspects got away with a total of 2.4 million euros, prosecutors said, adding that they would seek to have the proceeds seized.
Klette is said to have acted as the getaway driver in many of the heists and to have carried a “realistic looking” dummy bazooka in incidents that also involved assault rifles.
She is charged with armed robbery and attempted murder in connection with the alleged hold-ups, which prosecutor Annette Marquardt said had left 24 people traumatised in their wake, some of them seriously.
Her two alleged accomplices in the heists, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, would be 57 and 71 respectively if they are still alive. Their whereabouts are unknown.
Arrested in her Berlin flat in 2024 after more than three decades in hiding, Klette also faces separate charges including murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery related to RAF attacks staged in the 1990s.
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Prosecutors accuse her of involvement in an RAF plot to blow up the Deutsche Bank offices in 1990.
She is also said to have strafed the US embassy in Bonn with machine gun fire in 1991 and to have bombed the newly built Weiterstadt prison near Frankfurt in 1993.
When Klette was arrested, police found a Kalashnikov assault rifle, explosives and large sums of cash in her Berlin flat, where she had lived for about 20 years.
Defiant
Appearing in court last year, Klette remained defiant and vowed to continue the struggle against “capitalism and patriarchy”.
Complaining that Klette had shown no remorse, prosecutor Marquardt said the defendant was “self-obsessed”.
“Your attitude is really outrageous,” Marquardt said, adding that Klette was “losing sight of what this is all about”.
During the trial, Klette accused prosecutors of pursuing a form of “victor’s justice”, a charge that Marquardt denounced as “vile” given that some war criminals had levelled the same accusation while on trial after World War II.
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The RAF – also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang after two of its early leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof – emerged out of the radical fringe of the 1960s student protest movement.
For decades, its militants took up arms against what they claimed was US imperialism and a “fascist” West German state riddled with ex-Nazis. They also staged a series of attacks aimed at freeing jailed members.
A communique attributed to the RAF announced the group’s dissolution in 1998.
The group is believed to have been responsible for 34 deaths in various attacks over nearly three decades, including of police officers, judges, American soldiers and a former Nazi SS officer who later became a prominent industrialist.
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