Germans to release Baader-Meinhof leader with five life sentences

The German government claim that they can’t find a good reason to keep Christian Klar behind bars, so they plan to parole him.  Klar led the Red Army Faction, otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, a radical Marxist militant gang that killed at least 30 people during its period of terror.  Klar follows his comrade-in-arms Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who also got paroled 21 months ago:

A German court has approved the release from jail of a leader of a radical leftist group involved in high-profile killings in the 1970s and 1980s.

Red Army Faction leader Christian Klar, aged 56, is serving five life terms but will have served the minimum required 26 years by January.

The court in Stuttgart said there were no grounds to keep him in custody.

No grounds, eh?  How about the fact that Klar has served less than a year in prison for every person his group murdered?  In 1982, Klar was found personally guilty for nine murders and 11 attempted murders.  That gives him less than three years each for just the murders, with the attempts ignored altogether.

When people say they mistrust a law-enforcement approach to terrorism, this is exactly what they mean.  Terrorists of any political stripe represent more than just murderers.  They attack the foundations of democracy itself by attempting to impose policy on the vast majority of citizens who reject it.  They use murder as an end to political means, which attempts to both kill human life and the democratic community as a whole.

I’d normally say that this makes them more dangerous than ordinary murderers, but Klar actually qualifies as something more than that as well.  His nine murders make him a serial killer, and the multiple homicides make Baader-Meinhof a mass-murdering group as well.  Would Germany release a known serial killer on parole?  Just on that basis, how can they justify releasing Klar?

Oh, but don’t worry, Germans.  The court has imposed five years of parole as a condition of his release.  I’m sure the families of his 30+ victims will feel so much better.

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