Former RAF Member Sentenced for Armed Robberies
Daniela Klette, a former member of the German militant group Red Army Faction (RAF), has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for a series of armed robberies committed between 1999 and 2016.
Klette, aged 67, was apprehended in a Berlin apartment in 2024 after evading capture for over three decades. Her trial commenced last year.
The defence sought her acquittal, but the court in Verden, Lower Saxony, convicted her on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, violations of weapons laws, and other related offences spanning 17 years.
The RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was disbanded following a violent campaign involving murder, kidnapping, and bombings from the early 1970s until the early 1990s.
Details of the Crimes and Trial
The court determined that Klette, alongside two other former RAF members, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub—who remain at large—carried out robberies targeting supermarkets and armoured vans.
During the verdict announcement, dozens of Klette's supporters expressed their dissent by booing and chanting
"freedom for Daniela".
Hans-Jakob Schindler, head of the Counter Extremism Project in Berlin, described Klette as
"a kind of grandmother heroine for the extreme left in Berlin".
Although Klette did not explicitly acknowledge her RAF membership during the trial, Schindler informed the BBC that she would not face prosecution for alleged offences from the RAF era due to the statute of limitations.
Robbery Incidents
The trial concentrated on eight robberies across northern and western Germany. The first occurred in Duisburg in July 1999, where masked assailants rammed a cash transport van and threatened guards with firearms and a grenade launcher before escaping with a substantial sum.
The final robbery took place in June 2016 near Braunschweig, where the perpetrators seized nearly €1.4 million (£1.2 million) from an armoured transport van.
Capture and Investigation
Klette was arrested in February 2024 following a police tip-off. She had been living under an assumed identity with a foreign passport in a quiet street in Berlin's Kreuzberg district.
She was subsequently transferred to Lower Saxony, the region where many of the robberies occurred, to face trial.
Despite her decades on the run, prosecutors noted that Klette made no effort to conceal her identity.
Hamza, a neighbour in Berlin, recounted seeing her walking her dog and described her as friendly, often greeting people. He expressed shock upon learning about her criminal past.
Klette had been using the name Claudia for several years. An investigative journalist employed AI facial recognition technology, comparing an old wanted poster image with recent online photos, which led to her identification.
Police searches uncovered weapons, ammunition, a replica rocket-propelled grenade, wigs, false identification documents, gold, and €240,000 in cash.
