How Germany’s most wanted criminal hid in plain sight

It took authorities more than thirty years to track down one of Germany’s most wanted fugitives. For Michael Colborne, an investigative journalist who ran old photos through a facial recognition service, it took about 30 minutes.

At the request of a German podcast duo, he had been asked to look for matches with the decades-old wanted photos of Daniela Klette, a member of the left-wing militant group Red Army Faction, Germany’s most notorious post-war terrorist group, originally known as the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Instead, the facial recognition software he was using caught a woman named Claudia Ivone. In one photo, she posed with her local capoeira group as they waved their arms exuberantly. Another showed her in a white headdress throwing flower petals with an Afro-Brazilian association at a local street festival.

He had come across an alias that Ms Klette had been using for years while hiding in plain sight in the German capital.

This week, German police announced they had finally arrested Ms Klette, now 65, labeling her arrest a “masterpiece” and a “milestone”. Some German journalists had a different interpretation of events.

“What was their success?” asked a journalist, challenging officials at a news conference this week. “Listen to a podcast?”

It is still unclear whether Mr. Colborne’s findings for the podcast Legion, whose final season on Ms. Klette was released in December on the German public broadcaster ARD, effectively leading to Ms. Klette being discovered by the police. Police say they found her thanks to a tip in November, around the same time Mr Colborne, 42, and Legion were conducting their investigation.

Nevertheless, it raised an uncomfortable prospect: that a fugitive who had eluded German police since Mr. Colborne, a Canadian journalist who works for the investigative website Bellingcat, was in high school, was identified with relative ease using two publicly available programs, PimEyes. and AWS recognition.

“Someone like me, who doesn’t speak German, who doesn’t know much beyond Daniela Klette’s basic background – why was I able to find such a clue in literally 30 minutes?” he said. “There are hundreds of German far-right extremists with arrest warrants. If I can find someone who has been on the run for 30 years, why can’t the German authorities find some of these other wanted people?”

The question comes at a time when Germans are increasingly concerned about security. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germans are well aware of the risks to Europe as the country witnesses the largest land war since World War II.

In late 2022, German intelligence services discovered that one of their own officers had been working as a double agent, sending sensitive information about the war to Russia.

Around the same time, police discovered a network of conspiracy theorists with far-right ties, who had hatched a violent and fantastic plot to storm the German parliament in the hope of sparking a coup.

Peter Neumann, a German professor of security studies at King’s College London, said a major flaw in Germany’s ability to track extremists and militants is an overzealous application of data protection laws, which many Germans attribute to the country’s history of surveillance and repression under the Nazis and in the communist former East Germany.

“This has been a democratic state for more than 70 years, and this state is really hampered by its inability to collect data, even for perfectly legitimate reasons,” Professor Neumann said.

German police, he argued, are hampering their own ability to fight crime through “overcompliance” or overly strict laws. He said police are not able to record conversations between members of organized crime, such as sitting next to someone in a restaurant and an innocent conversation would also be heard.

Another problem, he said, was that Germany has been struggling for years and failing to digitize a government that stubbornly clings to paper mail and even fax machines.

“They don’t necessarily think in terms of the presence of people in the virtual space,” he said. “Right-wing extremists, as well as jihadists, operate in online spaces on message forums – in places where German authorities would not consider this to be real. But they are certainly real.”

Ms. Klette is a relic from another era of security threats, when left-wing militancy was one of the most violent threats to society.

According to police, Ms. Klette and two accomplices, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, who are also wanted in connection with Red Army Faction activities, committed at least thirteen violent robberies during her time in hiding, netting them approximately two million euros. (just over $2.1 million).

The police are still looking for Mr. Staub and Mr. Garweg. They think the two men are still in Berlin.

Ms. Klette lived for years in the historically left-wing Kreuzberg district. Neighbors told local reporters that she was a friendly, calm presence and was often seen with a large white dog. She taught local children and helped write letters, a neighbor told Bild, a tabloid. A friend who sometimes visited was about Mrs. Klette’s age and wore a long white ponytail.

A Brazilian woman from Berlin posted on Facebook how shocked she was to discover that a woman she had done capoeira with was a fugitive.

“If the German secret police had not found Daniela Klette, Brazilians would not have guessed that the capoeirista, who paraded at the Carnival of Cultures, is Germany’s most wanted national and international terrorist,” she wrote.

After finding a hand grenade in her home on Wednesday, police evacuated the gray, nondescript rent-controlled building on a street where the Berlin Wall once stood. The next day they discovered a grenade launcher and a Kalashnikov machine gun.

Kreuzberg, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Berlin, has a special history with the Red Army Faction. It was there in a basement where, in February 1975, the group held Peter Lorenz, a political boss in Berlin, for five days in what they called the “people’s prison.” Lorenz was only released after the West German government agreed to free several RAF guerrillas in an exchange.

It’s also the kind of neighborhood where well-paid government consultants live next to Turkish immigrants, benefit recipients and artists, and where Berlin’s attitude of letting everyone live as they please is still strongly felt.

On Facebook, Ms. Klette posted mostly photos of flowers and posters advertising events at the Afro-Brazilian association in which she was active. It was those photos that finally got her in trouble.

However, Mr. Colborne’s unwittingly successful identification of her for Legion last winter initially led nowhere as the podcasters were unable to find the woman in the photos he found.

His realization that his detective work had indeed worked, he said, has stirred up conflicting feelings. It shows the power, he said, of what someone using easily accessible software can do with a single photo.

“You can find photos that they don’t even know were taken of them. You can find out where they lived and where they went to college,” he said. “I cannot emphasize enough that some of these tools can and will be further abused by bad actors.”