Kohl Vows Crackdown on German Terror Group

Chancellor Helmut Kohl said Saturday that his government would use all legal means to combat a new wave of Red Army Faction terrorism that cost the life of a leading armaments industry official.

“This act of cowardly brutality is a challenge to the state and to all of us,” Kohl said in a telegram to Ingrid Zimmermann, whose husband, Ernst, 55, was fatally shot Friday in their home in the Munich suburb of Gauting.

“We will oppose such violence with all legal means. Terror cannot be allowed to have a chance in our country,” Kohl said.

Authorities reported no concrete results in their search for the young man and woman who broke into Zimmermann’s home and shot him in the head with a revolver. Bavarian police had initially reported Zimmermann was shot with a submachine gun.

Zimmermann was chairman of Munich’s Motoren und Turbinen Union which manufactures engines for military aircraft, tanks and ships. He died of massive brain damage in Munich University Clinic less than 12 hours after the daybreak shooting.

The Red Army Faction, an urban guerrilla group once known as the Baader-Meinhof gang and responsible for a terror wave in West Germany during the late 1960s and 1970s, claimed responsibility for the murder.

The guerrilla group is waging a new bombing and arson campaign in support of 22 accused or convicted terrorists held in various prisons across the country. The 22 began a hunger strike on Dec. 5 to demand prisoner of war status, and are also seeking be held in the same prison.

Five of the prisoners, including Red Army Faction leaders Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who were arrested in November, 1982, broke their fast over the weekend, authorities said.

Police on Saturday circulated composite drawings of the suspected left-wing terrorists and carried out spot searches of automobiles in Bavaria and near the Austrian border.

Officials were searching for Werner-Bernhard Lotze, 32, and Barbara Meyer, 28, Red Army Faction members said to resemble the composite drawings, although the federal prosecutor’s office said it is not certain that they are the killers.