No answers from Red Army Faction member over shooting

A FORMER member of the far-left Baader-Meinhof gang broke almost 20 months of silence at her murder trial yesterday to deny involvement in the assassination of Germany’s chief prosecutor in 1977.

Authorities had been hoping that Verena Becker’s trial would answer one of the last remaining questions about an anti-establishment guerrilla campaign that rocked West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although three members of the gang, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), were convicted of the killing of federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback at the height of the campaign, their vow of silence meant that the identity of the motorcycle rider who shot him in his car was never established.

Mr Buback’s son, Michael, has joined the case as a civil plaintiff in the hope of finding some closure.

But Becker, 59, who is being tried in the courtroom built specially to try RAF members at the Stammheim high-security prison in Stuttgart, broke her silence only to assert her own innocence, not to incriminate anyone else.

“I cannot answer the question of who killed your father. I wasn’t there,” she said in a 20-minute statement, delivered in a trembling voice. She said she had been in Yemen at the time.

Prosecutors say they have no evidence to suggest that Becker fired the shots, but she went on trial in September 2010 for complicity in the murder after her DNA was found on letters in which the RAF claimed responsibility for the assassination.

Many former RAF members summoned as witnesses have all asserted their ignorance or their right not to testify.