2024-03-22 05:11:30
For almost 30 years, between 1970 and 1998, the left-wing extremist terrorist organization Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) held Germany in its grip. A week ago, on Monday evening, after a 30-year manhunt, a female terrorist from that group was captured in Berlin. Daniela Burdock65 years old, lived in an anonymous gray condominium protected by a false Italian passport registered to Claudia Ivone. It is still not clear whether she was helped by anyone while she was on the run. According to the terrorism expert Hans-Jakob Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project «there is a large and very active left-wing extremist scene in Berlin. Members of the RAF are still heroes to many in this environment. For the new generation of left-wing extremists, these are grandmothers and grandfathers to be venerated.”
Klette/Ivone has probably lived all these years thanks to the loot from the numerous robberies of cash vans and supermarkets in which she took part between 1999 and 2016. During the search of her apartment the police discovered a veritable arsenal: a anti-tank grenade, a bazooka, a Kalashnikov, explosives, firearms, pistol magazines and ammunition. There is suspicion that the weapons come from old RAF depots. Arrest warrants for robbery and murder are pending on the sixty-five-year-old who gave mathematics lessons and dedicated himself to capoeira in Berlin, and who spoke about himself on a Facebook account. Klette, like her accomplices still on the run Ernst Volker Staub e Burkhard Garweg, belongs to the so-called third generation of the RAF. This group is held responsible for, among other things, the killing of Detlev Karsten Rohwedderthe manager of the Treuhandanstalt, the company for the restructuring and liquidation of the state industrial assets of the former GDR, murder which occurred in Düsseldorf in 1991.
Staub, now 69, and Garweg, 55, are still at large, the State Office for Criminal Investigation of Lower Saxony suspects that the two are in Berlin and are hiding a dangerous arsenal like the one found in Klette’s house, which for the removal required the evacuation of the building as well as the one opposite. For the German authorities, the arrest of the terrorist is an important investigative success.
The Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser declared: “The rule of law has demonstrated its perseverance and its staying power.” Her colleague in Lower Saxony, Daniela Behrens, described the arrest as a “milestone” in German criminal history. But among so much enthusiasm there are also those – in the far left circles – who show solidarity with the terrorist who ended up in handcuffs. The autonomous left-wing cultural center “Rote Flora” in Hamburg wished her health and happiness on a banner. The left-wing newspaper “Tageszeitung” asked the question: “Does Germany have no other problems in 2024 than hunting down RAF pensioners? Don’t the police have enough to do with the approximately 400 active neo-Nazis currently evading arrest?”
The RAF was a left-wing extremist terrorist organization particularly active in the 1970s. It was founded by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and other. For many, including much of the foreign press, it is always the Baader Meinhof gang, named after the two founders who later committed suicide in prison in Stuttgart.
The group was responsible for more than 30 murders, bomb attacks, kidnappings and bank robberies. He also left behind 200 wounded. They targeted people and institutions that in their view represented the capitalist and imperialist system. The first generation of the group focused on attacking the “state apparatus of domination”, the second on violent actions for the release of group members already behind bars. Until the disbandment of the RAF in 1998, the assassinations of the third generation, that of the Klette, were designed to target important economic and political figures. The most famous case in the history of the RAF is the kidnapping and murder of the president of the German Confindustria Hans Martin Schleyer in 1977. Now, after the arrest of the terrorist who lived like a ghost in Berlin, Germany suddenly found itself face to face with those years of lead, which for many young people are absolutely unknown.
2024-03-22 05:11:30