A former member of the West German Red Army Faction (RAF) has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for a string of armed robberies carried out while she was on the run from the authorities.
Daniela Klette, 67, has been found guilty of six counts of “particularly serious robbery” committed between 1999 and 2016, along with charges of extortion and weapons offences. The trial was held in Germany under tight security.
Klette spent more than 30 years as a fugitive before her arrest in February 2024 at a flat in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, where she had been living under a false identity for about 20 years.
The Baader-Meinhof gang, also known as the RAF, was a left-wing anti-capitalist organisation that carried out killings, bombings and kidnappings mainly during the 1970s and 1980s. Named after early leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the group emerged from the radical fringe of the student protest movement of the late 1960s.
The RAF is believed to have been responsible for 34 deaths, including those of police officers, judges, American soldiers and a former Nazi SS officer who later became a prominent industrialist. The group formally disbanded in 1998.
According to prosecutors, Klette and two male associates — Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub — continued robbing security vans and supermarkets after the RAF’s disbandment to fund their lives in hiding. The trio made off with a total of €2.4 million from the heists, prosecutors said.
Klette was accused of having acted as a getaway driver and of carrying a “realistic looking” dummy bazooka in raids during which the men were armed with assault rifles.
“They carried out their robberies with a division of labour and in a highly conspiratorial manner,” presiding judge Lars Engelke said. The three had rented getaway cars under false identities and spoke of the armed robberies as “their work” and source of income, he added.
When Klette was arrested, German police found a Kalashnikov assault rifle, explosives and large sums of cash inside her Berlin flat.
Investigators are still searching for Garweg and Staub, who if still alive would now be 57 and 72 respectively.
A number of sympathisers cheered the defendant from the public gallery during the proceedings, with shouts of “Free Daniela!” leading to at least one woman being escorted out by security personnel, according to AFP.
In separate proceedings before a different court, prosecutors accuse Klette of involvement in three politically motivated attacks while the RAF was still active. Those include a 1990 plot to blow up the offices of Deutsche Bank, a 1991 machine-gun attack on the US embassy in Bonn and a 1993 bombing of the Weiterstadt prison near Frankfurt.
In an earlier court appearance, Klette remained defiant and vowed to continue the struggle against “capitalism and patriarchy”.
