After decades on the run, 67-year-old woman jailed for armed robbery

2026-05-27 15:58:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

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.

Daniela Klette, 67, was finally caught in a Berlin apartment in 2024, after more than 30 years on the run. She went on trial last year.

Her defense had asked for her acquittal, but the court in Verden in Lower Saxony found her guilty on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, weapons violations and other criminal offenses over a 17-year period.

The RAF, a violent anti-capitalist group also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was eventually disbanded after a campaign of murders, kidnappings and bombings from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

The court found that Klette had robbed supermarkets and armored vans along with two other former members of the RAF faction, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, who have yet to be caught.

Dozens of Klette's supporters booed the guilty verdict in court, chanting "freedom for Daniela."

According to Hans-Jakob Schindler, head of the Counter-Extremism Project, she has become "a kind of grandmother heroine for the far left in Berlin."

Klette did not explicitly admit to being a member of the RAF during the trial, and Schindler told the BBC that she would never face trial on terrorism charges against her from that period due to the statute of limitations.

However, she could face a further trial, as federal prosecutors allege she was an accomplice in three of the group's attacks.

The trial focused on eight robberies across northern and western Germany, beginning in the city of Duisburg in July 1999, when masked assailants attacked a cash van and threatened guards with guns and a grenade launcher, before making off with a large sum of money.

The latest raid, in June 2016, took place on an armoured transport van near the city of Braunschweig. The robbers seized almost 1.4 million euros (1.2 million pounds).

Klette was not caught until February 2024 after a tip-off to police. She had been living on Sebastianstrasse in Berlin's Kreuzberg area - a quiet street once divided by the Berlin Wall - under a false name and a foreign passport.

She was transferred to Lower Saxony, where many of the robberies had occurred, to stand trial.

Although Klette had been on the run for decades, prosecutors said she made no effort to hide her identity.

Hamza, one of her neighbors in Berlin, described seeing her walking her dog in Berlin. She seemed friendly and greeted him, Hamza told the BBC, adding that he was shocked to learn about her past.

Klette had been using the name Claudia for years, but was tracked down by an investigative journalist using artificial intelligence facial recognition software and comparing an image from an old wanted poster with recent photos from the internet.

A police search uncovered weapons, ammunition, a replica rocket-propelled grenade, wigs, fake identification documents, gold and 240,000 euros in cash.

Klette's defense lawyers always argued that there was no evidence that she was involved in the robbery, claiming that the only criminal offense she had committed was related to the weapons in her apartment./CNA, translated by BBC