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Germany: Old cases, new trials: sentences for Klump and Weinrich

01 August 2004

On 23 August the Berlin regional court acquitted Johannes Weinrich (allegedly connected to the group of German militants active around the "Carlos" group in the 1970s and 1980s) of the charge of having committed several bomb attacks in France, Germany and Greece in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Andrea Klump has recently admitted in her trial in the Higher Regional Court in Stuttgart to having known about a bomb attack against Jewish emigrants in Hungary in 1991, which her then partner and ex-Rote Armee Fraction (Red Army Fraction) member Horst Meyer allegedly carried out. Meyer was shot dead by police during his and Klump's arrest in Vienna in 1999. What both trials have in common is that the accused have already been sentenced and imprisoned whilst facing additional charges of terrorist acts from the 1980s: Klump has been in prison since 1999 and received a nine-year sentence for an attempted bomb attack in 1988 against a Nato base in Spain. Weinrich has been imprisoned since 1995 and received a life sentence in 2000 for a bomb attack on the French cultural centre Maison de France in Berlin in 1983. He will therefore remain in prison after his acquittal. Weinrich was acquitted because of a lack of evidence. Apart from the fact that the court found no credible witnesses, the French public prosecutor has not verified that the relevant bomb attacks, for which several groups claimed responsibility, were carried out by the so-called Carlos group in the first place. There was also no hard evidence against Klump, leading the Süddeutsche Zeitung to speculate that Klump's defence changed its strategy with her admission of knowledge but not involvement in the failed bomb attack (she had denied the charges until now) to avert a possible charge of attempted murder.

Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.8.04; analyse & kritik 1.3.04