STUTTGARD (dpa) – Andrea Klump has no doubt heard of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof but when the 43-year-old goes on trial in Stuttgart on Tuesday prosecutors will try and prove that she too was a member of the most dangerous anarchist group to ever threaten Germany, the ultra leftwing Red Army Faction.
Klump will appear before justices at Stammheim, the high security prison that symbolizes the struggle of the German state against its terrorist demons. It was here that Meinhof and Andreas Baader were tried in the 1970s and sentenced for a campaign of terror that rocked postwar Germany.
That was decades ago and the RAF announced in 1998 that is has officially ceased to exist. Only a handful of the so-called second and third generation of the RAF, who were inspired by Baader and Meinhof, have ever been brought to justice and many of their crimes remain unsolved.
Klump will appear at the prosaically named “multi-purpose hall” in the drab suburb of Stuttgart-Stammheim in front of judge Udo Heissler to answer charges of attempted murder, kidnapping and extortion. She is also accused of being a member of the RAF.
Klump was arrested on September 15 last year after a shoot-out on a Vienna street during which the man with her, suspected RAF member Horst Ludwig Meyer, was shot dead by police.
She denies being a member of the RAF and via her lawyers, Klump lets it be known that the trial against her is designed to cover up the fact that “for the past 15 years the federal criminal office and the prosecution have been chasing the wrong suspects.
“This makes it clear that since the mid-1980s they have no idea who was in the RAF and who committed the crimes attributed to it”.
Federal prosecutors do not share Klump’s view but there is no getting away from their complete lack of success in arresting perpetrators of some of the RAF’s most audacious attacks.
The killers of high profile banker Alfred Herrhausen, the Deutsche Bank boss who was blown up in his car in Bad Homburg on November 30, 1989, have never been found.
“We haven’t got very far in recent years but we haven’t given up,” federal prosecution spokesman Eva Schuebel said when asked about progress on the case. Suspects have either turned out to have alibis or were considered unfit to stand trial. The only clue police have to go on is that a man in a jogging suit was seen near at the scene before the bomb blasted to smithereens Herrhausen’s car.
Detlev Rohwedder, head of a federal agency entrusted with privatizing former state-owned companies in east Germany after reunification in 1990, was shot dead as he stood at the window of his office at home on April 1, 1991. The gunman fled through nearby allotment gardens and has never been found.
Klump is alleged to have joined the RAF in 1984 after years of sympathizing with the extreme leftwingers. While in her early 20s she took part in political sit-ins at a church and theatre and is said to have corresponded regularly with RAF terrorists in prison. The prosecution says she attended a military training course in Syria.
Together with Meyer and another RAF member Klump is accused of having planned an attack on a hotel in Rota, Spain sited close to a NATO military base. The bomb attack had to be aborted after a fuse failed to ignite and the terrorists fled. The bomb, wrapped up as a gift, was packed with five kilos of nails.
The prosecution says Klump and her fellow desperadoes hijacked a camping van and forced a couple and their child at gunpoint to drive them to Seville. Meyer and Klump obtained forged identity papers and vanished from the scene until the shoot-out that cost Meyer his life.
German investigators say Klump maintained a cache of weapons while in Vienna and was in touch with other RAF members. They also say it’s unclear whether the pair opted out of terrorism when the RAF dissolved itself.
Klump has also been mentioned in connection with the murder of Herrhausen but according to the federal prosecutor’s office, “Investigations into this are still continuing.”
