Germany experienced few incidents of international terrorism in 1991, and its prosecution of numerous international terrorist suspects continued. Rapid political evolution in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as the continued assimilation of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), contributed to a significant increase in rightwing extremism and violence, especially against immigrants. German leftwing radical elements pursued their traditional anticapitalist and anti-imperialist agenda.
In its first lethal attack in more than a year, the radical leftist Red Army Faction (RAF) killed Detiev Rohwedder in his Dusseldorf home in April 1991. Rohwedder was the head of the government agency responsible for privatizing or closing thousands of state-owned companies in the former GDR and symbolized for the RAF the spread of capitalism to the former Communist states. In June, a Berlin housing official was killed by a letter bomb, possibly by pro-RAF militants protesting the elimination of cheap public housing in the united city.
To protest the Persian Gulf war, the RAF strafed the American Embassy in Bonn with approximately 250 rounds of automatic rifle fire in February. Only minor property damage resulted. Militants associated with the RAF and other leftwing radical groups, such as the Revolutionary Cells, mounted 10 other attacks during the war, such as firebombings against stores in Frankfurt and IBM and Coca-Cola targets in Freiburg. In March, a NATO pipeline was blown up by the Revolutionary Cells in yet another protest against the war.
None of the current generation of the RAF commando echelon has been captured. German authorities, however, did prosecute several RAF commandos, all but one of whom were arrested in 1990 after hiding for nearly 10 years in the GDR. In 1991, five were sentenced to prison terms and three were charged for terrorist crimes committed between 1977 and 1981. A renewed campaign by RAF prisoners to press authorities to colocate themselves generated relatively little outside support, possibly indicating weaker coordination and commitment among RAF prisoners, militants, and supporters.
Evidence linking the former East German secret police, or Stasi, to currently active members of the Red Army Faction did not emerge in 1991. Arrest warrants were issued in March for several former Stasi officers familiar with previous RAF activities.
There were no attacks by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) against British military targets in Germany in 1991. Several PIRA suspects were, however, extradited to Germany from the Netherlands in July and October to stand trial for anti-British attacks carried out there in the late 1980s. Two other suspected PIRA operatives were acquitted in Dusseldorf of an attempted bombing in 1988 of British army barracks in Duisburg; however, they will be tried on other charges.
Trials continued in 1991 for nearly 20 alleged members of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) on charges ranging from membership in a terrorist organization to murder. Turkish, including Kurdish, radicals remained active in Germany in support of terrorist organizations operating in Turkey. Several were arrested when demonstrations against Turkish diplomatic or consular posts in Germany turned violent. Turkish airlines and bank offices in Germany were frequent targets of firebombings and violent protests as well. Ten German tourists were abducted by the PKK in Turkey for a week in August.
Two German relief workers were the final remaining Western hostages held in Lebanon at the end of 1991. For their release, the abductors demanded clemency for two Hizballah members jailed in Germany: Mohamed Ali Hamadi, the hijacker of a TWA flight in 1985 who is serving a life sentence for murder, and his brother Abbas Hamadi who was sentenced to 13 years by a German court for related crimes. The German Government has refused to make such concessions to the hostage takers.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) members Hafiz Dalkamoni and Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar were sentenced in June to 15 and 12 years, respectively, by a German court for attempted murder in failed attacks against US military duty trains in 1987 and 1988. Dalkamoni's trial for manslaughter in the death of a German bomb-disposal technician also began in 1991. The bomb technician was killed while examining a bomb prepared for use by the PFLP-GC in its planned campaign in the fall of 1988 against civil aviation. That campaign was thwarted by arrests made by German authorities in October 1988. Charges against Daher Faour, a suspect in the 1986 bombing of the La Belle disco in Berlin, were dropped for lack of evidence.
Germany expelled nearly 30 Iraqi diplomats, including all those assigned to the Berlin office, as part of a European campaign to deny Iraq the opportunity to foment terrorist attacks against Western targets during the Persian Gulf war.
Source: United States Department of State, April 1992.