Former Red Army Faction (RAF) member Daniela Klette has been sentenced to thirteen years in prison in North Germany for six violent robberies between 1999 and 2016.
Klette was arrested in the heart of Berlin in 2024 after it emerged that she had been living there under a false identity for years. The woman opened the door herself when the police rang the doorbell and showed an Italian passport. At the police station it turned out that ‘Claudia Ivone’ was actually the long-wanted terrorist of the extreme left-wing terrorist organization RAF.
After her arrest, German media flocked to Sebastianstrasse, where Klette lived on the fifth floor. According to her astonished neighbors, Klette was not very talkative, but she always said hello politely.
Klette speaks of a “political” process. According to her, she is being persecuted because of her struggle against the ‘system’, which according to Klette is a system of capitalism and imperialism.
However, Klette’s ideology did not seem to play a major role for the judges. Klette was convicted of six serious robberies between 1999 and 2016 and for possession of weapons. During those robberies, she and her accomplices stole a total of 2.7 million euros. The RAF was officially disbanded in 1998; The robbery was mainly intended to provide for the livelihood of Klette and the two other former RAF members in hiding, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub.
Klette’s RAF membership and her fight against the “system” will be discussed in the future: prosecutors in Frankfurt have charged Klette with participating in a number of RAF attacks in the 1990s, including a 1991 attack on the American embassy in Bonn.
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