BERLIN — A grenade and other weapons were found in searches of the Berlin apartment where a suspected former member of the left-wing militant Red Army Faction group was arrested this week after more than three decades in hiding, authorities said Thursday.
Daniela Klette, 65, was arrested on Monday afternoon. While much about her whereabouts in the past 30 years remains unclear, she apparently had been living in the German capital under a false name for some time.
Klette is accused of participating in a string of robberies between 1999 and 2016, after the Red Army Faction was disbanded. She is suspected of robbery and attempted murder together with two other suspected ex-members of the group who remain on the run, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg.
The Red Army Faction, which emerged from German student protests against the Vietnam War, killed 34 people and injured hundreds of others.
The group launched a violent campaign against what members considered U.S. imperialism and capitalist oppression of workers. It declared itself disbanded in 1998.
Police said on Tuesday that an initial search of Klette’s apartment turned up two magazines and ammunition that would fit a handgun, but no weapon.
On Wednesday evening, they evacuated the seven-story building and closed the street in the city’s Kreuzberg district as they brought out the grenade and other unspecified objects. Early Thursday morning, Berlin police wrote on social network X, formerly Twitter, that their work was complete and residents could return.
Authorities said later Thursday that the objects found in the searches also included explosives, various type of ammunition and firearms, including a Kalashnikov, a machine pistol and a handgun with ammunition.
Prosecutors in the northern town of Verden and Lower Saxony’s criminal police warned that Klette’s two alleged accomplices, Staub and Garweg, may be in Berlin and “also pose a potential threat to the public.”
They asked the public for assistance in the search for the pair.
The case in which Klette was arrested covers only the robberies after the group’s disbanding, which authorities believe were meant to finance the three suspects’ lives underground rather than being politically motivated.
But federal prosecutors say that an arrest warrant they issued long ago for Klette related to alleged activities with the Red Army Faction in the early 1990s remains valid.