Search for wanted far-left RAF terrorists continues in Berlin
German police were searching another flat in Berlin on Sunday evening as the manhunt for two fugitive members of the disbanded far-left Red Army Faction (RAF) in the German capital continued.
The operation followed the surprise arrest of RAF terrorist suspect Daniel Klette six days ago.
The police raid in the flat on Grünberger Strasse in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain on Sunday evening was connected to the search for Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, two RAF suspects still on the run, a spokeswoman for Lower Saxony police, the force leading the operation, said.
It comes after police earlier searched a construction trailer site in Friedrichshain, a Berlin district neighbouring Kreuzberg, where Klette was arrested on Monday.
Investigators assume that one of the suspects, Garweg, had been staying at a trailer on the site which was taken away for forensic investigations.
A police spokeswoman declined to say how long Garweg might have used the accommodation.
The site, which was taken over by a left-wing alternative association after the fall of the Berlin Wall, includes small shacks, some of which house workshops, as well as caravans.
German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that Garweg is said to have lived permanently on the site and stayed there often.
In total, police provisionally held 10 people on the premises on Sunday, according to the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office. "All of the people have already been released after the identity checks were completed," it said.
Staub, 69, and Garweg, 55, went underground more than 30 years ago at the same time as Klette, 65.
All three were members of the so-called "third generation" of the RAF, often known in the English-speaking world as the Baader-Meinhof Group after two of its most prominent original members.
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."
Klette was arrested in her rented apartment in Berlin on Monday evening. She had been a fugitive for three decades 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.
During the time of the RAF third generation, the then Deutsche Bank boss Alfred Herrhausen (1989) and Treuhand boss Detlev Karsten Rohwedder (1991) were murdered and Herrhausen's driver was 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 to destroy the capitalist social order in West Germany.
There is widespread speculation they were partly funded by the Communist East German state and its secret police arm, the Stasi.
