A member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) has been arrested in Germany after more than three decades on the run.
Daniela Klette is one of three members of the so-called third generation of the far-left urban guerrilla organisation who had been in hiding since the 1990s.
Wanted for attempted murder, a series of armed robberies and other offences, Klette was arrested in Berlin on Monday after a raid carried out by officers from Lower Saxony and Berlin police and involving Europol.
The 65-year-old is being held in custody having been brought before a judge in Verden, Lower Saxony.
The arrest came after a television programme, Aktenzeichen XY – the German equivalent of the UK’s Crimewatch – recently profiled the trio, and was led by investigators in Lower Saxony where many robberies took place between 1999 and 2016. The robberies are not believed to have been acts of terrorism but are suspected of financing the fugitives’ lives underground.
The programme led to 250 tipoffs about the suspects’ possible whereabouts. Police had offered an award of €150,000 (£128,000) for any information leading to the whereabouts of the three.
Klette’s fellow suspects, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, are still believed to be on the run.
The RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, after its founding members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, was behind a campaign of terror in what was then West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, involving attacks, kidnappings and murders.
The group is believed to have been responsible for about 30 murders, and for injuring another 200 people. The attacks reached a peak in the so-called German Autumn of 1977 when a nationwide search was launched to locate the group’s members.
Their actions, interpreted in part as their generation’s angry reaction to their parents’ and grandparents’ apparent complicity in the Nazi era, have inspired a range of books and films.
The RAF’s victims included the Dresdner Bank boss Jürgen Ponto, the Deutsche Bank chair Alfred Herrhausen, the head of the agency overseeing state-owned property of the former communist East Germany, Detlev Rohwedder, the West German attorney general Siegfried Buback, the business executive Hans Martin Schleyer and the senior West German diplomat Gerold von Braunmühl.
The murders of Herrhausen and Rohwedder, the latter known as the RAF’s last victim, are attributed to the third generation to which Klette is believed to have belonged.
The group announced it was disbanding in 1998.
Police and special forces stormed the central train station of the German city of Wuppertal earlier this month after receiving a tipoff that Staub was on a train there. There was no confirmation of the sighting and no arrest was made.
The interior minister of Lower Saxony, Daniela Behrens, called the Klette arrest a “fantastic success” and said it sent out the message “that terrorists in Germany can never feel safe”.
“This is also a signal for the victims of terrorism that acts of terrorism do not go forgotten,” she said.
Klette did not resist arrest, according to officers. Investigators found ammunition and two magazines for a handgun in her flat.
The tipoff that led to her arrest had come in November, they said. They also said Klette had lived under a false identity, but declined to give any more details. According to an unconfirmed report in Spiegel magazine, she was in possession of an Italian passport.
The prosecutor Clemens Eimterbäumer said authorities would continue to search for Staub and Garweg.
Germany’s office for criminal investigations recently issued an appeal to the consciences of the families of the former RAF members, urging them to approach the authorities anonymously with any information that could lead to their loved ones’ arrests.
Klette is suspected of involvement in a gun attack on the US embassy in Bonn in 1991 and an explosive attack in Weiterstadt in 1993. There is evidence to suggest that she was also at the crime scene during a 1993 anti-terrorism operation in Bad Kleinen, Mecklenburg, in which the police officer Michael Newrzella and the RAF member Wolfgang Grams were killed and the former RAF member Birgit Hogefeld was arrested.