Germany to free unrepentant Red Army Faction terrorist

ONE of the last members of the left-wing Red Army Faction (RAF) that terrorised Germany in the 1970s and is still in prison will walk free in January after 26 years behind bars, a Stuttgart court ruled.

Christian Klar, in jail since 1982, will be freed on parole on January 3 after serving the minimum 26 years of his life sentence on nine counts of murder and 11 counts of attempted murder, the court decided.

Klar, who is now 56, is one of only two surviving members of the RAF — also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after two of its founders, the late Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof — still to be in prison.

He has never repented his crimes, but the court ruled yesterday that he no longer posed a danger to society.

Klar turned his back on violence and now demonstrated “constructive behaviour” court spokesman Josefine Koeblitz said.

The RAF declared war on what it called the morally bankrupt West German state still being run by former Nazis, carrying out a wave of assassinations, bombings and kidnappings from 1970 onwards. After Baader, Meinhof and other founder members were arrested in 1972, Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt took over the leadership of the group and embarked on a campaign of terror that shook West Germany to its foundations.

On April 7, 1977, they murdered federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, shot dead by a man on a motorbike with a machine gun while his Mercedes waited at traffic lights.

On July 30, RAF militants including Klar shot dead the chairman of Dresdner Bank, Juergen Ponto, outside his house near Frankfurt in a failed kidnap attempt.

In September 1977, they abducted industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, a former member of the Nazi SS, and demanded the release from prison of Baader and other RAF leaders, Meinhof having been found hanged in her prison cell a year earlier.

A month later theRAF hijacked a Lufthansa passenger plane with the help of Palestinian militants, diverting it to the Somali capital Mogadishu. The hijack ended when German commandos stormed the plane on October 17, 1977.

The next morning, Baader and fellow founder-members Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their cells, and on October 19, Schleyer was shot dead. In 1981, Klar helped to launch a near-fatal rocket attack on an American general, Frederick Kroesen, before being arrested the following year.

The group, which is believed to have killed a total of 34 people, abandoned violence in 1992 and formally disbanded in 1998.

Mohnhaupt, who led the RAF with Klar after the group’s original leaders committed suicide in jail, was released from prison in March 2007 after serving 24 years for her role in nine murders. In May 2007, German president Horst Koehler refused to pardon Klar or Birgit Hogefeld, the two remaining RAF members still in prison.