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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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121189
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1990-09-22
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WORLD, Page 54TERRORISMTarget for the Red Army FactionA moribund group roars back by killing "The Lord of Money"
Bad Homburg, an elite spa north of Frankfurt, is home to many
of West Germany's top executives and bankers. Last Thursday morning
the most eminent of the lot, Alfred Herrhausen, 59, chief executive
of Deutsche Bank and personal economic adviser to Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, left his home at the usual time, shortly after 8:30 a.m., and
set out for Frankfurt's financial district in his armored,
chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz 500SE, escorted by two other
automobiles with four bodyguards. The car had traveled 550 yds.
along a tree-lined street when a tremendous explosion hurled it
into the air, reducing it to a charred, smoking hulk. Herrhausen
died instantly.
As police poured into the area, a small wooden box containing
a detonator was found in a nearby park. The box apparently had been
connected by cable to a bomb attached to a bicycle parked on the
limousine's route. Police say the bomb included a light-sensitive
device that triggered the explosion precisely as Herrhausen's
limousine passed by. Under the box was a piece of paper with the
all too familiar star-shaped symbol superimposed on a drawing of
a Kalashnikov rifle: the trademark of West Germany's ultra-leftist
urban terrorists, the Red Army Faction.
Suddenly, three years after its last assassination, the R.A.F.
had roared back into life with the murder of West Germany's most
influential captain of finance. Herrhausen ran the country's
largest bank (assets: $165 billion), maintained close ties with
Soviet and East European officials and was an outspoken advocate
of German unification. Only last spring the weekly Der Spiegel
dubbed him "the Lord of Money."
The federal prosecutor named as possible suspects Christoph
Seidler, 31, and Horst Meyer, 30, both believed to be R.A.F.
commandos. A third man, as yet unnamed, is also a suspect.
Most puzzling to the police was why now, with most of its
hard-core members dead or serving long prison terms and its extreme
left-wing ideology on the wane, the group had chosen to strike.
There is still a commando group of about 15 members at large in
West Germany. Some security experts doubt that the Herrhausen
murder signals a new wave of R.A.F. terror. But, declared Heinrich
Boge, head of the Bundeskriminalamt, which coordinates federal
criminal investigations, "there was never any indication that they
were giving up."
Since taking over as Deutsche Bank's sole chief executive in
May 1988, Herrhausen had aggressively begun to change the bank, the
world's 20th largest, from an insular institution to a global
financial power. Only last week he made a $1.4 billion takeover bid
for the British merchant bank Morgan Grenfell Group PLC. Throughout
his life, Herrhausen viewed himself as a man driven by destiny to
lead West Germany to new heights as a world economic power. It was
a mission that was brutally shattered on a street in Bad Homburg
last Thursday morning.