RAF Clemency Decision
March 8, 2007
For the relatives of those killed and the surviving victims of Germany's Red Army Faction terrorist group, the painful wait to see if former RAF member Christian Klar will be pardoned and released goes on.
In a letter to RAF kidnapping victim Beate Keller, German President Horst Köhler said he would need more time to come to a decision regarding Klar's release.
"A decision is not forthcoming," said the letter sent to Keller by the presidential office and undersigned by the president's assistant secretary, Gert Haller, under orders from Köhler himself. "Many points of view have to be considered and due to this, a decision may take some time."
Undecided despite understanding
The letter added that the president "understands the grief and pain that (Keller) and the other people affected by the crimes of the RAF feel, and that the extremely sensitive discussion within the German public has resurrected those feelings and made you live through them again."
Köhler was responding to a letter sent by Keller, who was among those on board a Lufthansa passenger plane that was hijacked by the RAF in 1977.
Keller wrote to the president in February demanding that he take into consideration the damaging effects the RAF had had on her and other victims' lives and refuse to pardon and release Klar, who is nearing the end of a 24-year sentence for multiple murders. His prison term ends in 2009 but his legal team is calling for clemency from the German president.
Victims lament Mohnhaupt's imminent release
Relatives of the RAF's victims have denounced campaigns to release the remaining imprisoned former members of the terrorist group, claiming that Germany is not ready to draw a line under one of the darkest chapters in its postwar history.
A court ruled last month that Klar's former-RAF comrade Brigitte Mohnhaupt should be released from prison in March after spending over 24 years behind bars for her role in the group's kidnappings and killings. Two other members of the RAF are still behind bars.
The RAF, which rose from the student protests of the late 1960s, is suspected of having killed 34 people between 1972 and 1991. The group disbanded in 1998.