Earth bunker with documents from the 80s: forest workers may discover RAF depot – politics

Forest workers may have come across a Red Army Fraction (RAF) depot in Lower Saxony. During tree cutting work in a forest area in the Seevetal area, the workers discovered an earth depot on Friday, said the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office (LKA) in Hanover at the weekend.

 The  buried plastic barrel contained, among other things, documents from the 1980s and containers with liquids.

 The  forest area around the site had been extensively searched for further depots, it said.

 The  barrel with the documents had apparently been underground for decades. Samples from it were sent to forensic laboratories for examination.

“After an initial assessment of the found written material, a reference to the nationwide terrorist group RAF cannot be ruled out,” explained the LKA. This is now being investigated by LKA experts.

Due to the age of the discovered objects, however, the police did not assume that there would be any evidence of the whereabouts of the wanted ex-RAF terrorists Ernst Volker Staub, Burkhard Garweg and Daniela Klette.

 The y are also wanted for a series of twelve robberies from 1999 to 2016 – with a Europe-wide search call by the LKA Lower Saxony.

 The  authorities assume that the trio wanted to raise money for a life in illegality by robbery.

 The  RAF declared itself dissolved in 1998. In the previous decades, the group had committed a series of bloody acts, including the assassination of Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and the kidnapping and murder of employer president Hanns-Martin Schleyer in 1977 and the fatal bomb attack on Deutsche Bank boss Alfred Herrhausen in 1989. (AFP / dpa)