It was the most spectacular arrest in decades in connection with the left-wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF). Following tips from the public, investigators from Lower Saxony rang the doorbell of an apartment building in the district of Kreuzberg in Berlin on February 26, 2024.
The woman they arrested there was 65-year-old Daniela Klette, a member of the former RAF, also known as the Baader–Meinhof Group. Since then, investigators have hoped to solve many previously unsolved crimes committed by the group which carried out assaults and terrorist attacks in Germany until the 1990s.
Among other things, investigators found €40,000 (about $42,000) in cash, a bazooka with a warhead, pistols and Kalashnikov rifles. There was also an embarrassing mishap: officers apparently allowed Klette to use the restroom, during which she seized the opportunity to warn her suspected accomplice Burkhard Garweg by phone.
Garweg, who was also in Berlin at the time, and the third suspected former terrorist, Ernst-Volker Staub, have since disappeared. "I can't imagine that the two of them are currently living out their days in peace," Friedo de Vries, the head of the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office, told the German Press Agency. "We are determined to arrest Mr. Garweg and Mr. Staub."
The weapon finds are the biggest success for the investigating authorities in years. One of the pistols, for example, comes from a raid on a gun store in Maxdorf, Rhineland-Palatinate in 1984. Officers........