The leftist group started off in the 1960s as the Baader-Meinhof Gang but later became known as the Red Army Faction. Under both names, their members became known for a string of bombings, murders and band robberies that peaked in the 1970s but continued through the 1980s.
The founders of the group were Marxists who were fond of quoting Mao. They were imprisoned for a time but during an amnesty they were released and went underground, eventually receiving weapons training from the PLO. They then returned to Germany as the Red Army Faction and began a campaign of murders of prominent figures.
Eventually the founders of the group were tried and convicted. In October of 1977, terrorists hijacked a German plane and demanded the release from prison of 11 RAF members. Authorities refused and special forces retook the plane, killing three of the four hijackers. When the RAF members learned the hijacking had failed, they made a suicide pact and killed themselves.
But the RAF continued for another two decades and one of the people who joined in the 1980s was Daniela Klette. Klette and her comrades were implicated in several bank robberies and one attempted murder but they were never caught. For 30 years here whereabouts were a mystery until very recently when a popular crime show in Germany put out a call for tips about Klette. She was arrested two weeks later.
The arrest comes after a police appeal for information about three Red Army Faction (RAF) fugitives on a popular TV crime show two weeks ago that yielded 250 tip-offs...
The charges facing Klette, along with Garweg and Staub, relate to millions of euros' worth of armed robberies and at least one attempted murder committed between 1999 and 2016.
But these crimes were not committed in RAF's name: the group wound itself up in 1998, sending an anonymous letter to Reuters' office in Cologne in which the remaining members declared that "the urban guerrilla group in the form of the RAF is now history".
Police claim their arrest of Klette came as a result of the TV show tips, but there was also podcast which had set out weeks earlier to identify her and it turns out they succeeded.
Not long before she was arrested, a podcast company in Berlin, Undone, set out to find her. They had been contacted by a listener who said he’d been at a party where a woman had claimed to be Klette.
“It was a crazy story,” says Patrick Stegemann, who worked on the series.
Undone brought in an AI expert who deployed facial recognition software to search the internet for pictures that matched one of Klette on an old “Wanted” poster. It came up with a match for a woman living as “Claudia” not far from where the podcasters operate out of an old industrial premises in Berlin. But when they went to look for her, she was nowhere to be found.
Two months later, when Daniela Klette, was arrested, it became clear that they had identified the right woman.
The facial recognition seems to have worked because Klette posted photos of herself with a dance group.
For several years she was deeply involved in a Brazilian culture centre in the district, where she practised capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines dance and fighting. There is photographic evidence she travelled to Brazil with her dance troupe; she held a falsified Italian passport. Members of the group recall a friendly, gentle but taciturn character.
It is thought that the discovery of photographs of her with her capoeira group at Berlin’s annual carnival of cultures – smiling, tossing petal confetti, a white bandana on her head – led to her identification and arrest.
Police have yet to confirm the link between the arrest and a podcast from 2023 for which an investigative journalist from the website Bellingcat put the police wanted notice of Klette from the 1990s through the AI image search tool PimEyes, which detected images of the older version of her, AKA Claudia Ivone the capoeira enthusiast, online.
Police are not allowed to use facial recognition to track people but in this case it was a concerned citizen who did the work and possibly gave the police a tip. Klette was living quietly but police found lots of money and guns in her apartment. There's no doubt they have the right person.
when she was arrested in late February, the police found tens of thousands of euros in cash in her Berlin flat and five weapons, among them a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a replica rocket launcher.
So after 30 years on the run, Klette is in prison now and will probably never get out given the number of crimes she's accused of committing.
Shortly after Klette was arrested, her comrade Burkhard Garweg (left photo above) was allegedly spotted begging in a train station in Berlin.
A member of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, who has been on the run for decades, has been spotted begging at a train station in Berlin.
Burkhard Garweg, a senior member of the extremist group, also known as the RAF or Red Army Faction, was seen begging at the Oberbaum Bridge, German media reported on Thursday.
Homeless Germans based in the same area told Bild, a German tabloid, that they instantly recognised Garweg and had last seen him there about a week and a half ago.
I guess bank robbery isn't a steady career. The third and last member of the group still on the run is Ernst-Volker Staub (center photo above). His whereabouts are unknown.
Police were quick to take credit for the arrest but it sounds like they didn't do much in this case. Here's an interview with the Bellingcat journalist who identified her using publicly available tools and an old photo.
