Germany's Most-Wanted Woman Gets 13 Years

After three decades underground, Germany's most-wanted woman is facing more than a decade behind bars. A court on Wednesday sentenced 67-year-old Daniela Klette, a former member of the Red Army Faction, to 13 years in prison for a string of armed robberies carried out long after the far-left militant group disbanded, the Guardian reports. Judges found her guilty on six counts of aggravated robbery tied to kidnappings for ransom and illegal possession of military-grade weapons, concluding a tightly guarded 14-month trial. Prosecutors had sought the maximum 15-year term.

Klette spent over 30 years eluding police before being arrested at her Berlin apartment in February 2024, where officers say they found weapons, forged IDs, wigs, gold, and $280,000 in cash. Prosecutors allege she and two still-fugitive accomplices, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, robbed armored cars and supermarkets across three states, netting more than $2.3 million. Prosecutors said the robberies between 1999 and 2016 were intended to fund their lives underground after the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof group, disbanded. At the start of the trial, Klette said the proceedings were politically motivated and vowed to keep fighting "capitalism and the patriarchy."

Supporters in court jeered the verdict and rallied outside with "solidarity" signs. She has become "a kind of grandmother heroine for the extreme left in Berlin," Hans-Jakob Schindler, chief of the Counter Extremism Project, tells the BBC. Separate proceedings in Frankfurt will address alleged RAF-era attacks from the 1990s, including a 1991 shooting in which the US Embassy in Bonn was hit by dozens of bullets. Any charge of terrorist-group membership has expired under Germany's statute of limitations.

• Klette was arrested after a podcast team using AI-powered search tools uncovered images of her on Facebook. DNA from Staub and Garweg was found in her apartment, but authorities have not been able to track them down. "They could still be here, they could be abroad," Schindler says. "I guess they have learned the lesson not to put any pictures of themselves online."