A former member of an infamous left-wing terrorist group was convicted and sentenced on Wednesday to 13 years in prison for a string of violent robberies she committed in Germany to finance her life on the run.
Daniela Klette, 67, was part of the Red Army Faction, a group that was originally known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang that committed terrorist acts in Germany from the 1960s until the 1990s. She had been in hiding for more than 30 years before she was found living in plain sight in Berlin in 2024 under an assumed name.
A panel of five judges ruled that Ms. Klette had robbed several armored cash vehicles and supermarkets across western Germany between 1999 and 2016, working with two former members of the Red Army Faction who remain at large.
The robberies, which all occurred after the group was disbanded, netted the trio more than $3.1 million, prosecutors said. In one incident, Ms. Klette and her accomplices held up an armored truck, tied up its driver after threatening him with a fake grenade launcher, and fired bullets into the truck to break it open.
The court found that she had committed six counts of aggravated robbery, as well as attempted aggravated robbery, violations of firearms laws, and kidnapping for ransom. She was not convicted of the more serious crime of attempted murder, for which the prosecution had demanded a 15-year sentence.
Ms. Klette also faces separate charges related to earlier acts of alleged terrorism committed while the Red Army Faction was still active.
The group, which Ms. Klette joined years after it was founded, followed a Marxist-Leninist ideology and targeted American and capitalist interests in West Germany.
In March, Germany’s federal prosecutor announced that she had been indicted on two counts of attempted murder, kidnapping, and causing an explosion.
Those charges, which were not included in the case that concluded on Wednesday, were linked to three separate attacks in the early 1990s on a bank building, a United States government building in the former West German capital, Bonn, and a newly-built prison, which was not yet occupied.
After decades on the run, Ms. Klette was arrested in 2024, living under an assumed Italian identity in Kreuzberg, a hip neighborhood of Berlin. She was discovered after an investigative journalist searched the web with facial recognition technology that unearthed photos of her on the Facebook page of a local Capoeira club. Police officers who raided her home found gold, a fake grenade launcher and 240,000 euros, or roughly $280,000, in cash.
A group of her supporters attended the trial, which took place in Lower Saxony, a region of western Germany where some of the robberies occurred.
On Wednesday, several of those supporters loudly protested her conviction when it was read out in a former riding hall in the town of Verden that had been repurposed into a high-security courtroom.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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