A German court has sentenced Daniela Klette, a 67-year-old former member of the Red Army Faction (RAF), to 13 years in prison for a series of armed robberies carried out between 1999 and 2016. The regional court in Verden, a town in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, found her guilty on Wednesday of aggravated robbery, extortion, weapons offences and related crimes across eight raids targeting supermarkets and armoured cash transport vans. Prosecutors had sought 15 years. Dozens of supporters in the courtroom booed the verdict and chanted "freedom for Daniela."
The robberies spanned 17 years and reached across northern and western Germany. The first took place in Duisburg in July 1999, when masked attackers rammed a cash transport vehicle and threatened guards with guns and a grenade launcher. The final raid, near the city of Braunschweig in June 2016, netted almost €1.4 million. The court concluded that Klette carried out the raids alongside two other former RAF members, Burkhard Garweg and Ernst-Volker Staub, who remain at large and are still on Germany's most-wanted list.
Klette had evaded capture for more than 30 years, living under a false identity in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighbourhood — a historically bohemian district once divided by the Berlin Wall. She adopted a Brazilian persona, going by the name Claudia Ivone and integrating into a local capoeira community. Her cover was broken in early 2024 when an investigative journalist used AI-powered facial recognition software to match old wanted-poster images with recent photographs found online. When police arrested her in February 2024 following a tip-off, they found weapons including a Kalashnikov rifle, a rocket-propelled grenade replica, false identity documents, gold and €240,000 in cash. A Brazilian acquaintance who had known her for years said: "I don't know Daniela Klette, I know Cláudia. She was like a sister to me."
The RAF — also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang — was a violent far-left anti-capitalist group that conducted a campaign of murder, kidnapping and bombing in West Germany from the early 1970s until the organisation officially disbanded in 1998. Its attacks killed at least 34 people. Klette is identified by authorities as belonging to the group's third and final generation. Although her RAF membership cannot be prosecuted due to statutes of limitations, federal prosecutors have filed separate charges alleging her involvement in three attacks from 1990 to 1993 — including a shooting that hit the US embassy in Bonn, a failed bombing near a Deutsche Bank building, and the 1993 destruction of a prison under construction. A decision on whether that second trial proceeds rests with authorities in Frankfurt.
The case has reignited debate in Germany about how to reckon with the RAF's legacy. Commentary from the German left-leaning press notes that the trial was a missed opportunity for genuine historical reflection, particularly given that Klette used her closing statement to cast herself as a fighter for a better world rather than engage critically with the RAF's violent methods. For counter-extremism analysts, her arrest and conviction underscore an unresolved chapter of European political violence — and the two fugitives still on the run serve as a reminder that it is not fully closed.