After more than three decades evading law enforcement and a high-profile trial, a one-time leading member of Germany’s infamous militant Red Army Faction (RAF) has received a 13-year prison sentence for orchestrating and carrying out a series of violent armed robberies spanning 17 years.
Sixty-seven-year-old Daniela Klette, who spent over 30 years as a fugitive following the disbandment of the RAF, was only apprehended in February 2024 during a raid on a quiet residential apartment in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. Found living under a false identity using a foreign passport, Klette was quickly transferred to Lower Saxony – the region where the majority of her criminal offenses took place – to face trial later that same year.
The Red Army Faction, also widely known by its alternate name the Baader-Meinhof Gang, carried out a decades-long campaign of politically motivated violence across West Germany from the early 1970s through the early 1990s, which included bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings. The group formally disbanded in the early 1990s, but Klette and two other former faction members remained at large, turning to a string of armed robberies to fund their life off the grid.
In a verdict delivered Wednesday at the Verden regional court in Lower Saxony, judges found Klette guilty on multiple charges: aggravated robbery, violations of Germany’s strict weapons laws, and several other related criminal offenses connected to eight separate raids carried out between 1999 and 2016. Klette’s defense team had pushed for a full acquittal during the proceedings, but the prosecution’s evidence linking her to the crime spree proved overwhelming.
Court documents confirm Klette carried out each robbery alongside two other former RAF affiliates: Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, both of whom remain at large as of the verdict. The crime spree began in July 1999 in the western German city of Duisburg, when masked attackers rammed an armored cash transport van, threatened security guards with firearms and a grenade launcher, and escaped with an undisclosed large sum of cash. The final recorded robbery took place near Braunschweig in June 2016, when the gang stole nearly €1.4 million (approximately £1.2 million) from another armored van.
Notably, prosecutors noted during the trial that despite decades on the run, Klette made no deliberate effort to conceal her true identity from acquaintances in her Berlin neighborhood, allowing investigators to eventually track her down after years of cold leads.