Men detained in Berlin are not suspected fugitive far-left terrorists
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The people detained in connection with the hunt for fugitive suspected terrorist members of the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF) are not the two wanted men, according to a spokeswoman for the State Criminal Police Office of Lower Saxony.
Police carried out large-scale raids in Berlin on Sunday morning, seeking Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, two suspected terrorist members of the RAF who are still on the run after going into hiding decades ago.
They detained two people and earlier were checking their identities.
The authorities have been searching for fugitive members of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, for more than 30 years.
Sunday's raid began at 07:30 (0630 GMT) and involved members of the national and city police forces.
The sounds of gunshots were heard at one location during the detentions, but no one was injured, the spokeswoman said. The noises came "in connection with a door opening."
Sunday's provisional detentions came days after the arrest of suspected far-left RAF terrorist Daniela Klette last week.
Klette, 65, was arrested in her rental apartment in Berlin on Monday evening. She had been a fugitive for 30 years but was found living under a false name in the middle of the German capital.
The authorities accuse Klette, Staub and Garweg of attempted murder and a series of serious robberies between 1999 and 2016, some of which involved the use of firearms and a bazooka.
The RAF was founded in 1968 by far-left extremists Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, with members active well into the 1990s. It was also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
Like Klette, Staub and Garweg belonged to the third generation of the former RAF.
During their active time, the then Deutsche Bank boss Alfred Herrhausen (1989) and Treuhand boss Detlev Karsten Rohwedder (1991) were murdered and Herrhausen's driver seriously injured.
The RAF murdered more than 30 people during their reign of terror
but disbanded in 1998.
The group justified its attacks back then with the aim of destroying the capitalist social order in West Germany. There is widespread speculation they were part funded by the Communist East German state and its secret police arm, the Stasi.
