Berlin:
Investigative journalists using artificial intelligence tools tracked down a fugitive member of the notorious Red Army faction long before German police announced a breakthrough in the 30-year-old case earlier this week.
Daniela Klette, 65, a member of the left-wing militant group, was arrested at her Berlin flat on Monday on suspicion of carrying out a series of robberies and at least one attempted murder between 1999 and 2016 to finance her underground life.
German police and security services have criticized their failures in some politically charged investigations. Their defenders say strict privacy laws limit their ability to use the kind of artificial intelligence-enhanced tools that a German TV podcast deployed last year to track Klette.
Daniela Behrens, the interior minister of the state of Lower Saxony where many of the crimes were committed, called Klette's arrest a major breakthrough and a tribute to the dedication of police and prosecutors in the case.
Last year, however, an ARD television podcast followed Klette, one of three RAF militants still wanted 26 years after the group announced its dissolution, by posting the photo of her wanted announcement via the image search engine PimEyes.
This produced images online of a much older woman named 'Claudia Ivone' who, until the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, was a regular participant in Berlin's Afro-Brazilian scene and a practitioner of the Brazilian war dance capoeira.
“I strongly advise you to follow this trail,” Bellingcat investigative journalist Michael Colborne recalled to the podcasters in an interview with the weekly Die Zeit on Thursday. He said he ran the photos through a variety of facial comparison tools and kept getting the same result.
The ARD podcasters reported their findings to law enforcement authorities, who said Tuesday that they were put back on Klette's trail in November by a tip from the public.
“For reasons of investigative tactics, we do not disclose our detection methods,” prosecutor Alexander Hege said when asked whether the podcast was the original source of the tip.
Klette's potential danger was highlighted on Wednesday evening when two buildings had to be evacuated after police found and defused a grenade and other explosives in her apartment in Berlin's artsy Kreuzberg district.
With the far-right Alternative for Germany party rising in the polls, police and security services are under increasing pressure to crack down on political extremists even as they operate under the shadow of past failures.
Most infamously, police missed several clues that could have led them more quickly to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground gang, which murdered nine immigrants between 2000 and 2006 and was only captured in 2011 after two members committed suicide, leading to a third suicide. in.
Police are still searching for two other members of the Red Army Faction, which emerged from left-wing protests against the Vietnam War in the early 1970s and killed 33 government officials, American soldiers and businessmen.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)