A suspected former member of a German left-wing extremist group once considered one of Europe’s most wanted women has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for crimes she committed while on the run.
The local court in Verden, Lower Saxony, found Daniela Klett, 67, guilty of aggravated robbery, extortion and violating weapons laws between 1999 and 2016, when she was on the run from authorities after the Red Army Faction (RAF) was formally disbanded.
Klett is understood to have carried out these crimes together with two alleged accomplices, Ernst Volker Staub and Burkhard Gerweg. The two men are also former members of the Royal Air Force and remain on the run.
According to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the verdict sparked outrage in the courtroom, with some spectators shouting, “Freedom for Daniela!” The paper said Klett has received support from some far-left groups in the country.
Klett has not yet been tried or sentenced for the crimes he allegedly committed while in the Royal Air Force and will be dealt with in separate legal proceedings. She does not explicitly acknowledge that she is a former Royal Air Force member.
The Royal Air Force, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, was born out of a radicalized left-wing student protest movement in West Germany in the late 1960s. Aiming to dismantle the capitalist system and what they saw as Western imperialism, they carried out violent crimes such as deadly bombings, kidnappings, and shootings throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Thirty-four people were killed, including West German politicians, banking, military, and business figures, including Dresdner Bank president Jürgen Pont and federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback.
Despite being the only woman to be tagged as a “dangerous person” on Europol’s most wanted list, she managed to evade detection by the authorities for almost half her life.
Klett remained on the run for nearly 30 years, but was tracked down and arrested near Berlin in February 2024. There she lived a seemingly normal life for years under the pseudonym Claudia Yvonne.
