Former German Terrorist To Go Free After 26 Years

BERLIN, Nov. 24 -- A German court on Monday ordered the release of a former leader of the Red Army Faction, the Marxist group that terrorized West German industrialists, bankers and politicians, as well as U.S. military officials, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Christian Klar, 56, will be freed on parole in January after serving 26 years for murdering nine people and attempting to kill 11 others, according to a decision handed down by a panel of judges in Stuttgart.

Only one other member of the Red Army Faction remains behind bars, as German judicial authorities have gradually allowed several convicted murderers from the group to rejoin a society they once swore to tear apart.

In August 2007, Eva Haule, 53, was released after serving 21 years for the 1985 murder of a U.S. soldier, Spec. Edward Pimental, and other crimes.

Pimental, 20, was shot after he left a dance club in the city of Wiesbaden. RAF members later used his military identification to drive a bomb-laden Volkswagen past a checkpoint at Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt. Two Americans, Airman 1st Class Frank Scarton and Becky Jo Bristol, a civilian employee, were killed when the bomb exploded outside the base headquarters.

In March 2007, German officials paroled Brigitte Mohnhaupt, now 58, another leader of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. Among other crimes, she and Klar organized a 1981 rocket attack in Heidelberg that nearly killed Army Gen. Frederick J. Kroesen, who was then commander of U.S. forces in Europe, and his wife.

Unlike some RAF members, Klar has never apologized or expressed remorse for his crimes, stirring a public controversy in Germany over whether he ought to be freed. In January 2007, he wrote a rambling letter to a conference of left-wing political groups in Berlin, urging them to "complete the defeat of the plans of capitalism."

The judges in Stuttgart, however, ruled that there was no evidence that Klar was still a security risk. The panel acknowledged that it was "a heavy burden for his victims and their families that the convicted man has yet to distance himself from his serious crimes." But it found that he had "completely changed" and no longer espoused violence.

The Red Army Faction was founded in 1970, a radical offshoot of a leftist student movement that had taken root across what was then West Germany. Over the years, the group became progressively more violent, targeting for assassination bankers, prosecutors and other agents of what it termed "the capitalist state."

While few Germans approved of the killings, sympathy for the group's ideological goals was widespread within the rebellious generation born after World War II, which was seeking to make a sharper break with the country's Nazi past and its postwar alliance with the United States.

The RAF was accused of killing 34 people before it disbanded in 1998. Four members remain on Germany's most-wanted lists but have not been seen in almost two decades.

The group's bloody history, however, still tugs at the memory of many Germans, who have eagerly absorbed a recent parade of books and films reliving the deeds of the RAF.

"The Baader Meinhof Complex," a docudrama that reenacts some of the group's grisliest murders, has played to packed movie theaters since it was released in September. The movie, which received subsidies from the German government, has been nominated for an Oscar.