Robberies, bomb plots and 30 years on the run: Germany jails the ‘far-left grandmothe

Daniela Klette, 67, was captured in 2024 after a 30-year manhunt, thanks to AI facial recognition software used by an investigative journalist who matched an old wanted poster image with recent online photos.

She was not tried for the Red Army Faction’s (RAF) terror attacks, but for a series of robberies carried out between 1999 and 2016. Prosecutors are still considering whether to file charges over earlier crimes.

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דניאלה קלטה טרוריסטית מ סיעת הצבא האדום ב גרמניה שהורשעה בשוד

Daniela appeared in court. She was convicted of a series of robberies – over a 17-year period

(Photo: Sina Schuldt/Pool via REUTERS)

The RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, emerged from radical left-wing movements in the 1960s and targeted government officials and business leaders in Germany. Klette is suspected of belonging to the group’s so-called “third generation,” which sought to overthrow what it viewed as a fascist capitalist system. The organization was linked to the deaths of 34 people between 1970 and 1991 before formally disbanding in the late 1990s.

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דניאלה קלטה טרוריסטית מ סיעת הצבא האדום ב גרמניה שהורשעה בשוד

Hugging her lawyer after the verdict was read. The prosecution is considering additional charges

(Photo: Sina Schuldt – Pool/Getty Images)

Klette was convicted over robberies committed across 17 years. The first took place in Duisburg in July 1999, when masked gunmen armed with rifles and an RPG robbed an armored cash vehicle. The last robbery, in Braunschweig in June 2016, netted 1.4 million euros (about 1,6 million dollars) from another armored vehicle. Her alleged accomplices, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, remain at large.

When police arrested Klette in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, where she had been living under the alias “Claudia” with a foreign passport, they found weapons, ammunition, an RPG component and 240,000 euro (around 279,027 dollars) in cash in her apartment.

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גרמניה דניאל קלטה מבוקשת סיעת הצבא האדום תמונה שהמשטרה פרסמה ב 1993

Captured in a photo released by German police in 1993

(Photo: AP)

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גרמניה המבוקשים מ סיעת הצבא האדום

Photos of the three wanted men from the “Red Army Faction” that the police previously distributed. The other two have not yet been captured

(Photo: Handout / STATE OFFICE OF CRIMNIAL INVESTIGATIONS LOWER SAXONY / AFP)

The court convicted her of aggravated robbery, weapons violations and related offenses. While membership in the RAF can no longer be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations, prosecutors are weighing possible charges tied to suspected involvement in a failed 1990 bombing at a Deutsche Bank branch, a 1991 shooting attack on the U.S. Embassy in Bonn and a 1993 prison bombing attempt.

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מחוץ לבית משפט בוורדן שבו הוקרא גזר דינה של דניאלה קלטה טרוריסטית מ סיעת הצבא האדום ב גרמניה שהורשעה בשוד

Dozens of supporters gathered outside the courthouse in Verden

(Photo: FOCKE STRANGMANN / AFP )

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מחוץ לבית משפט בוורדן שבו הוקרא גזר דינה של דניאלה קלטה טרוריסטית מ סיעת הצבא האדום ב גרמניה שהורשעה בשוד

‘A kind of grandmother heroine for the extreme left in Berlin’

(Photo: FOCKE STRANGMANN / AFP)

Dozens of supporters gathered outside the courthouse in Verden on Wednesday, chanting “Freedom for Daniela!” German media reported that some also disrupted the sentencing hearing. Hans-Jakob Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project told the BBC that Klette had become “a kind of grandmother heroine for the extreme left in Berlin.”