German Red Army Faction Leader Freed

A one-time leader of Germany's Red Army Faction was released Sunday after a quarter-century in prison for her involvement in some of the radical left-wing group's most notorious murders, a prison official said.

Brigitte Mohnhaupt, 57, was released from the Aichach prison in Bavaria, prison director Wolfgang Deuschl said. He said she was picked up by acquaintances and took personal belongings including some books, but did not give further details.

A Stuttgart court last month approved parole for Mohnhaupt, ruling that she could go free after serving the minimum 24 years. Combined with an earlier prison term, she has spent 29 years behind bars.

Her case — and that of Christian Klar, another Red Army prisoner whose bid for clemency President Horst Koehler is considering separately — have set off a debate about whether it is time to show mercy on imprisoned members of the group.

The two cases have brought back painful memories of the Red Army Faction's heyday in the late 1970s, when the group left a trail of dead bodies in its struggle against what it considered capitalist exploitation of workers.

Mohnhaupt was arrested in 1982 and convicted of involvement in nine murders, including those of West German chief federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, Dresdner Bank head Juergen Ponto, and Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the head of the country's industry federation. She was given five life sentences for murder.

Mohnhaupt shot Ponto three times when he resisted a kidnapping attempt in 1977, according to her conviction.

In other cases, she was involved in planning killings and attacks — including a 1981 rocket-propelled grenade attack on the car of U.S. Gen. Frederick Kroesen, then the commander of U.S. forces in Europe. Both the general and his wife were injured.

The Stuttgart court, supported by prosecutors, last month decided Mohnhaupt no longer posed a threat.

In its decision, the Stuttgart court noted that Mohnhaupt was not willing to completely repudiate her violent past. But it added that Mohnhaupt, at a closed parole hearing, said the time for "armed struggle" was over and acknowledged inflicting suffering on the victims' families.

Mohnhaupt had a job offer and an apartment lined up — in a place that the court did not disclose. She will be on supervised parole for five years and must report regularly to authorities.

Mohnhaupt was a top figure in what was sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof gang, after an earlier generation of leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who both killed themselves in prison.

The middle-class leftists emerged from German student protests against the Vietnam War, launching a violent, 22-year campaign against what they considered U.S. imperialism and capitalist oppression of workers.

At its peak, West Germany was shaken by the Sept. 5, 1977, kidnapping of employers' federation head Schleyer in an attempt to extort the release of Baader and others from prison.

When the government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt did not free Baader, Arab supporters hijacked a Lufthansa jet to Mogadishu, Somalia. German commandos freed the hostages but the kidnappers killed Schleyer, whose body was found in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France. Baader and two other Red Army Faction members killed themselves in prison.

The organization killed 34 people and injured hundreds, some simply unlucky enough to be driving or accompanying their prominent targets. It declared itself disbanded in 1998, a decision Mohnhaupt said she agreed with.