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

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.

Klette’s RAF 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 that 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 in Berlin, she has become “a kind of grandmother heroine for the extreme left in Berlin”.

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

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).

It was not until February 2024 that Klette was caught after a tip-off to police, living under an assumed name and a foreign passport in a quiet street in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin.

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 Klette’s 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.