Baader-Meinhof woman released after 25 years in jail
Brigitte Mohnhaupt, released from 24 years in prison on Sunday, March 25, 2007. (AP Photo/Police, HO) <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00152/brigittemohnhaupt38_1 52528a.jpg> Brigitte Mohnhaupt, released from 24 years in prison on Sunday, March 25, 2007. (AP Photo/Police, HO) Times Online and AP http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1566065.ece Brigitte Mohnhaupt, once a leader of the Baader-Meinhof gang and regarded as the most dangerous and evil woman in Germany, was released today after 25 years in prison for her involvement in some of the radical left-wing group's most notorious murders. Mohnhaupt, 57, was released from the Aichach prison in Bavaria and picked up by acquaintances, the prison director, Wolfgang Deuschl, said. A Stuttgart court last month approved parole for Mohnhaupt, ruling that she could go free after serving the minimum 24 years. Combined with an earlier prison term, she has spent 29 years behind bars. Mohnhaupt's case, and that of Christian Klar, another gang member whose bid for clemency President Horst Koehler is considering separately, have set off a debate about whether it is time to show mercy to those who showed none to their victims. The two cases have brought back to Germany painful memories of the late 1970s when the Baader-Meinhof gang, first known as the Red Army Faction, left a trail of dead bodies in its struggle against what it considered capitalist exploitation of workers. Mohnhaupt was arrested in 1982 and convicted of involvement in nine murders, including those of the West German chief federal prosecutor, Siegfried Buback, the head of the Dresdner Bank, Juergen Ponto, and Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the head of the country's industry federation. She was given five life sentences for murder. Mohnhaupt shot Ponto three times when he resisted a kidnapping attempt in 1977, according to her conviction. In other cases, she was involved in planning killings and attacks, including a 1981 rocket-propelled grenade attack on the car of an American, General Frederick Kroesen, then the commander of United States forces in Europe. Both the general and his wife were injured. The Stuttgart court decided last month that Mohnhaupt no longer posed a threat. In its decision, the court noted that she was not willing to repudiate completely her violent past. But it added that Mohnhaupt, at a closed parole hearing, said the time for "armed struggle" was over and acknowledged inflicting suffering on the victims' families. The former gang leader has had a job offer and has arranged accommoddation in a place that the court did not disclose. She will be on supervised parole for five years and must report regularly to authorities. Mohnhaupt became a leading figure in the gang in the footsteps of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who both killed themselves in prison. The middle-class leftists emerged from German student protests against the Vietnam War, launching a violent, 22-year campaign against what they considered American imperialism and capitalist oppression of workers. West Germany was shaken by the September 5, 1977, kidnapping of the employers' federation head, Schleyer, in an attempt to extort the release of Baader and others from prison. When the government of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt did not free Baader, Arab supporters hijacked a Lufthansa jet to Mogadishu, Somalia. German commandos freed the hostages but the kidnappers killed Schleyer, whose body was found in the trunk of a car in Mulhouse, France. The organisation killed 34 people and injured hundreds, some simply unlucky enough to be driving or accompanying their prominent targets. It declared itself disbanded in 1998, a decision Mohnhaupt said she agreed with. 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