German Prosecutors Indict Former RAF Member Daniela Klette for 1990s Terror Attacks

Germany's Federal Prosecutor's Office filed an indictment on March 27, 2026 against Daniela Klette, 67, a former member of the Red Army Faction, charging her with two counts of attempted murder, participation in explosive attacks, extortionate kidnapping, and particularly serious robbery. The case was filed at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court, which must now decide whether and when the trial will proceed. The charges relate to three RAF attacks carried out between February 1990 and March 1993. The indictment was filed exactly 33 years after the most significant of those attacks — the bombing of Weiterstadt prison.

200 kilograms of explosives leveled Germany's newest prison The centerpiece of the indictment is the March 27, 1993 bombing of the newly built and not yet opened Weiterstadt prison in southern Hesse, then considered Germany's most modern detention facility. Klette and her alleged accomplices, operating under the name "Kommando Katharina Hammerschmidt," climbed over the prison wall, overpowered guards with a submachine gun, and removed them from the premises handcuffed together with prison employees in a VW van. The group then detonated around 200 kilograms of explosives across five separate charges, which prosecutors say Klette helped place. Rupert von Plottnitz, then the Hessian Green party faction leader in the state parliament, described the event as the „five largest explosions in German criminal history” — Rupert von Plottnitz via Die Welt The damage was estimated at 63 million euros, and the prison could only be opened in 1997. Klette's alleged co-perpetrators Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg are also said to have been present at Weiterstadt; both remain at large, and investigations against them continue.

63 (million euros) — estimated damage from 1993 Weiterstadt prison bombing

The Red Army Faction dissolved in 1998 after nearly three decades of political violence in West Germany. Klette is considered a member of the organization's so-called third generation, which carried out attacks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She was arrested in 2024 as one of the last three RAF members still at large. Her RAF membership itself is now time-barred under German law, meaning she cannot be prosecuted for belonging to the organization — only for the specific criminal acts committed during that period.

At least 250 shots fired at the US Embassy in Bonn The second major charge concerns an attack on the United States Embassy in Bonn on February 13, 1991. According to the indictment, Klette and two other shooters fired at least 250 shots at the embassy building from the opposite bank of the Rhine using automatic long guns, with at least 57 projectiles striking the building. Prosecutors say the attack put at least 20 people in immediate danger. The third charge relates to a failed bombing on February 25, 1990, when Klette is alleged to have helped install 45 kilograms of explosives in the trunk of a VW Golf parked in the gateway entrance of a Deutsche Bank administrative building in Eschborn, near Frankfurt. The ignition device failed and no explosion occurred, but prosecutors assessed that three security guards present in a nearby guard room could have been killed had the device functioned. Taken together, the three attacks span a three-year period at the height of the RAF's third-generation campaign.

Three RAF attacks in the Klette indictment: — ; — ; —

Two fugitive accomplices still sought as trial awaits court approval The Frankfurt Higher Regional Court's State Security Senate must formally admit the indictment before a trial date can be set, meaning proceedings are not yet confirmed to begin. Staub and Garweg, Klette's alleged accomplices in the Weiterstadt attack, remain fugitives, and the state criminal police office said the manhunt for both men continues with new leads reportedly arriving regularly. Separately, the Verden public prosecutor's office has been investigating all three — Klette, Staub, and Garweg — for a series of robberies of cash transporters and cash offices in Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Schleswig-Holstein between 1999 and 2016, allegedly carried out to finance their lives underground after the RAF's dissolution. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR first reported the indictment before the Federal Prosecutor's Office confirmed it in a press release. Klette's RAF membership itself cannot be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations, but the specific criminal acts named in the indictment fall outside that bar.