Two people wanted as militant leftists are returning to Berlin this week. Their story is characterised by a long escape and exile in Venezuela. The surveillance by the German police was unprecedented.
In October 1994, the ‘K.O.M.I.T.E.E.’ carried out an arson attack on the military replacement office in Bad Freienwalde. It was aimed against German support for Turkish military policy and the suppression of the Kurdish liberation struggle. In April 1995, the group planned to blow up a deportation prison under construction in Berlin-Grünau to send a signal against Germany’s deportation policy. An ‘Easter egg’, sympathisers later wrote in a brochure about the attack, which failed because a passing police patrol discovered the preparations.
Evidence at the Berlin crime scene led to the identification of Peter Krauth, Thomas Walter and Bernhard Heidbreder as suspects in the attack. The three then embarked on an escape that would ultimately take decades. They eventually ended up in Venezuela. There they built a new life for themselves and became involved in local communities. The film ‘Against the Current’, which was released in 2019 and accompanies a visit by political rapper Mal Élevé to Walter and Krauth, provides insight into this life in exile.
Back in 2014, Heidbreder was arrested in Venezuela at the behest of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and Interpol, but was not extradited to Germany – the charges, including arson and membership of a terrorist organisation, were time-barred under Venezuelan law. Eight years later, the refugee commission there also decided in favour of an asylum application from Walter and Krauth. The decision from 2022 came too late for Heidbreder: the 60-year-old had died of cancer the previous year.
With the refugee status, Interpol cancelled the international arrest warrants filed by the BKA for Walter and Krauth. However, the German Federal Public Prosecutor General continued the manhunt. Although almost all of the charges were also time-barred in Germany, only the ‘conspiracy to commit an explosives attack’ with a 40-year limitation period until 2035 remained. The Federal Constitutional Court did not accept a complaint by Walter and Krauth’s lawyers against this Section 30 of the German Criminal Code, which penalises the mere conspiracy to commit a crime far more severely than the actual preparation of the crime.
During their escape, the BKA had undertaken extensive investigations against the three. Three other people became suspects for a time. The sister of one of the accused was also remanded in custody for several weeks, although she was able to provide an alibi for the time of the offence. More than 20 people were summoned by the police or directly by the Office of the Attorney General to give statements, one of whom was held in preventive detention for four months. Another person was able to successfully defend herself against being compelled to testify, but first had to endure searches and surveillance measures before the court ruled in her favour. On another occasion, lawyers’ conversations were tapped and illegally recorded.
In the mid-2000s, the BKA monitored other left-wing radicals travelling to Colombia. In Egypt, German investigators had the hotel room of an alleged contact person searched covertly for mobile phones. When a visitor to the Historical Museum in Berlin called up the BKA website with the wanted notice for the three Germans from a publicly accessible computer in 2006 and stayed there for seven minutes, the investigators took him for a ‘previously unknown person involved in the crime’. They tapped into the computer in the museum, installed a video camera and lay in wait for weeks – to no avail. Even the press was not spared: the editorial offices of the ‘Taz’ newspaper were searched and an editor who had reported on the case was monitored by the police for years.
During the intensive manhunt, the three wanted men had apparently long been in Latin America. Walter and Krauth also kept details under wraps when a foreign correspondent from the ‘Süddeutsche Zeitung’ visited Venezuela. However, Walter explains that the escape took place towards the end of the 1990s and would not have been possible without the help of people who offered financial support, accommodation and connections.
At the beginning of this year, the Federal Public Prosecutor General – initially surprisingly – brought charges against Krauth and Walter in connection with the planned attack in 1995. Behind this was a deal with the German authorities, as the defence lawyers for the two eventually made public: They would turn themselves in to the German authorities and receive a suspended sentence in return. They are due to arrive in Berlin this week on a flight from Caracas after a stopover in Madrid and a subsequent escort by BKA officers.
The trial will then begin on Monday at the Court of Appeal in Berlin. Not only the Federal Public Prosecutor General is likely to be eagerly awaiting a confession to the attacks on the military replacement office and the deportation prison. In these times of extremely intensified state defence against migration and militarisation, the background to the ‘Easter egg’ of 1995 is also interesting for today’s left-wing movements.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: Brochure on the failed attack on the construction site of the deportation prison in Berlin-Grünau at Easter 1995.
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