It‘s a climax of a series of robberies in northern germany of which the authorities believe is the work of the last remaining structures of the Red Army Fraction (RAF).
Three persons are suspected, called by the media the „RAF grandpas“ – although one of them is a woman named Daniela Klette, who is 57 years old. The other two are Ernst Volker Staub (61) and Burkhard Garweg (47).
All three of them are wanted since the late 80‘s for membership in the Red Army Fraction that committed its last bomb-attack in 1993, razing a freshly built refugee detention center to ground, before declaring the end of their armed actions in 1998.
In 1999, police found traces of DNA from Klette and Staub at the scene of a successful one-million-euro robbery in Duisburg, which led to an investigation against an imaginary 4th generation of the RAF.

It seems that the trio was able to stay unnoticed from then on, while executing several big robberies of stores and money transporters, until 2015 when police found a car with the DNA of all of them. The car had been used for the expropriation of a big supermarket and unfortunately didn‘t go up in flames after use.
This marked the point of sudden public and also prosecutors attention.

Today, authorities believe that according to similiar modi operanti, that the trio is responsible for at least nine such actions since 2011. Those speculations are supported by the fact that all of them happened in the same federal state of Niedersachsen and were outstandingly well prepared.

In another spectacular case, they blocked a money transporter with two cars, while the driver was waiting for one security-officer in front of a mega-store belonging to the walmart-chain.
While one of the trio went behind the officer who was in the shop to pick up money, another one got in position with a bazooka and the third shot a round of kalashnikov-bullets at the armoured vehicle to convince the driver to get out and hand over the bundles.
If the public statement of the police is believed, they didn‘t get money in this robbery.
But it‘s said that all in all they gained hundreds of thousands and several small firearms in the past years.

Meanwhile, the authorities published posters with pictures of three people and are offering a reward for hints that lead to arrests. The pictures are poor quality and the text next to them reveals that the cops are not sure whether they really show the suspected ones.

Only for Klette is it sure that it is her – only 30 years younger.
Nevertheless the manhunt might be one of the biggest cases for the Niedersachsen police department and it‘s quite sure the investigators are not providing all their information to the public. But it is known that they eventually try to grab even the smallest chance to gain more information. By also asuming that there‘s a network of supporters, they might use the case to have more tools for intelligence against todays anarchist and left-radical groups.
Recently, Andreas Krebs, a prisoner with contacts to the anarchist movement, stated that one day he suddenly got kidnapped from jail by investigators of three federal states and was pressured to reveal information about the trio while being driven through different parts of germany. Of cours, he did not co-operate.

The news about the gang came in 2016 and were for most people surprising.
The end of the history of armed struggle lies almost 30 years behind us and is thus for many in germany not so related to present struggles. But nevertheless, there are a lot of sympathies among the people, although, or even because, they are seen as just criminals.
Anyway, we have to organise solidarity for them, because they are questioning the highest principle of this society, which is the idea of private property.
Apart from this, their fight for survival in the underground is directly connected to an important part of the revolutionary struggle – a history that we have to appropriate again and again.
We will not let the german state extinguish the idea of armed struggle as a necessity of self-defence and attack.