Woman caught after 30 years on the run is jailed for armed robberies

A former member of the German militant group Red Army Faction (RAF) has been jailed for 13 years for carrying out a string of armed robberies between 1999 and 2016.

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

Her defence had called for her acquittal but the court in Verden in Lower Saxony found her guilty on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, violating weapons laws and other offences over a 17-year period.

Klette's RAF group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was eventually disbanded after a campaign of murder, kidnapping and bombing from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

The court found that Klette had robbed supermarkets and armoured vans along with two other former members of the RAF faction, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, who have not yet been caught.

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

The final raid, in June 2016, was on an armoured transport van near the city of Braunschweig. The robbers seized almost €1.4m (£1.2m).

It was not until February 2024 that Klette was caught, living under an assumed name and a foreign passport, in an quiet street in Kreuzberg.

She was moved to Lower Saxony, where many of the robberies had taken place, to stand trial.

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