Former RAF terrorist arrested in Berlin after decades-long hunt

Police in Berlin have arrested Daniela Klette, a former far-left terrorist from the Red Army Faction (RAF), security sources told dpa on Tuesday.

The authorities had been searching for fugitive members of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, for more than 30 years.

Klette, 65, was arrested in her rental apartment in Berlin on Monday evening, where she was living under a false identity, police said.

During a search of her flat, investigators reportedly found gun magazines and cartridges. A weapon was not found.

The RAF was founded in 1968 by far-left extremists Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, with members active well into the 1990s. The group justified its attacks, in which more than 30 people were killed, with the aim of destroying the capitalist social order.

Authorities accuse Klette and her fellow members Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub of attempted murder and a series of armed robberies between 1999 and 2016.

The public prosecutor assumes that the robberies were not politically motivated but committed for financial reasons.

The search for Staub, 69, and Garweg, 55, is ongoing. Shortly after Klette's arrest, another person in the "wanted age segment" was arrested in Berlin, police said. The identity of the man is still being clarified.

"This successful manhunt is the merit of decades of tireless investigative work," German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Tuesday.

"The constitutional state has shown its perseverance and staying power. No one should feel safe in the underground," Faeser was quoted as saying in a statement issued by her ministry.

The crimes of the RAF were "still unparalleled today in terms of the dangers of left-wing extremism and left-wing terrorism in the Federal Republic of Germany," Faeser said.

Investigators recently appealed to the public for help in locating the suspects, who went underground in the 1990s.

DNA traces led police to suspect the trio was linked to robberies of supermarkets and cash transports in the German states of North-Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony.

German public broadcaster ZDF featured the case on a special programme for unsolved cases earlier this month. Afterwards, police received more than 250 tips from the public, they said.

However, Klette's arrest was not the result of the programme.

Authorities say the RAF is responsible for the murder of 34 people and wounding of at least 200 others.

Staub, Klette and Garweg were part of the so-called third generation of the RAF, active in the 1980s and 1990s.

Representatives of this generation are said to have killed the then head of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, and the head of the Treuhand, the East German government agency, Detlev Rohwedder.

A 1998 communiqué signed by the RAF and sent to the Reuters news agency announced the group's disbandment.

Klette is suspected of having been involved in a gun attack on the US embassy in Bonn in 1991, dpa learned.

She is also suspected of involvement in an explosives attack on the Weiterstadt prison in 1993, and traces indicate that she was also at the scene of the 1993 anti-terrorist action in Bad Kleinen in Mecklenburg.