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 sentenced to 13 years in prison for carrying out a series of armed robberies between 1999 and 2016.

67-year-old Daniela Klette was finally caught in an apartment in Berlin in 2024, after living on the run for more than 30 years. He went to trial last year.

His defense had sought his acquittal, but the court in Verden, Lower Saxony, found him guilty on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, violating weapons laws and other crimes over a 17-year period.

Klette’s RAF group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was eventually disbanded after a campaign of murders, kidnappings and bombings that lasted from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

The court heard that Klette, along with two other former members of the RAF group, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, had robbed supermarkets and armored vans, having not yet been caught.

The trial focused on eight robberies in northern and western Germany, starting in July 1999 in the city of Duisburg. In that robbery, masked assailants crashed into a cash machine and threatened guards with a gun and a grenade launcher, before fleeing with a large sum of cash.

The last raid in June 2016 was on an armored transport van near the city of Braunschweig. The robbers made off with around €1.4 million (£1.2 million).

Klette was only caught in February 2024, living on a quiet street in Kreuzberg with a fake name and a foreign passport.

He was transported for trial to Lower Saxony, where most of the robberies took place.

Although Klette had been on the run for decades, prosecutors said he made no attempt to conceal his identity.