After evading authorities for more than 30 years, Daniela Klette has been handed a 13-year prison sentence by a German court for a string of armed robberies committed over nearly two decades.
The court found Klette, 67, guilty over a series of robberies carried out between 1999 and 2016. Police have identified her as a former member of the Red Army Faction, the far-left militant organisation that dominated headlines in West Germany during the Cold War era.
Klette was arrested in 2024, ending decades in hiding, after an investigative journalist used facial recognition software to locate her living in Berlin under an assumed name.
The Red Army Faction emerged from the leftist protest movements of the 1960s and went on to orchestrate kidnappings and murders, with violence peaking in the late 1970s before gradually petering out.
Police vehicles leaves the premises of the provisional courthouse of the Regional Court of Verden
Prosecutors said Klette belonged to what they described as the group’s “third generation.” The organisation is sometimes referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, after its founders, and pursued the overthrow of what it regarded as a fascist capitalist state. Authorities say the group killed about 34 people between 1970 and 1991.
Although the Red Army Faction issued a final statement in 1998 announcing an end to its “urban guerrilla warfare,” investigators have long maintained that individual members continued to evade capture for years afterward.
Police are still searching for two men suspected of acting as Klette’s accomplices: Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, both described as former Red Army Faction members.
