Suspected German Terrorist Slain In Austria

Police have shot and killed a wanted Red Army Faction terrorist on a Vienna street corner and arrested his female companion, reducing Germany’s long-standing most-wanted list of leftist terrorists to three.

Horst Ludwig Meyer, 43, was shot Wednesday after he drew a pistol and disarmed an officer who had asked to see his identification papers.

His companion was identified through fingerprints as Andrea Martina Klump, 42, a suspected member of the Red Army Faction wanted in the attempted bombing of a Spanish disco in 1988.

German authorities will seek Klump’s extradition from Austria, said Eva Schuebel, a spokeswoman for the German federal prosecutor in Wiesbaden.

The three Red Army Faction suspects still on Germany’s most-wanted list are Ernst Volker Staub, 44, of Hamburg; Sabine Elke Callsen, 38, of Hanover; and Daniela Klette, 40, of Karlsruhe.

The Red Army Faction has claimed responsibility for killing more than 30 people, including chief federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback, Dresdner Bank chief Juergen Ponto and Hans-Martin Schleyer, president of the German Employers’ Assn.

The group’s last fatal attack was the February 1991 shooting of Detlev Rohwedder, the head of the federal agency for privatizing former East German enterprises.

In its nearly 30 years of existence, the ultra-leftist group suffered 26 casualties.

The Red Army Faction’s attacks against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and industrial targets in Germany ended in 1992, when the group said it had given up violence. Last year, the group declared itself officially disbanded.

Police were summoned to a Vienna street corner Wednesday by a resident who had seen Meyer and Klump in the area for several days. There was no word on what they were doing in the city or how long they had been in Vienna.

Meyer went underground in 1984 with his wife Barbara, who returned voluntarily to Germany in May to face terrorism charges. She had been in hiding in Lebanon, but authorities said they didn’t know if Meyer and Klump were with her.

Meyer had been wanted in connection with the 1986 killing of Siemens research chief Karl-Heinz Beckurts, whose BMW sedan was blown 20 feet off the road while he was being chauffeured to work. The driver also was killed.

Meyer also was a suspect in an attempted car-bomb attack on a NATO school in Oberammergau, Germany, in December 1984. Officials found the bomb-laden car soon enough to defuse the device.

Many of the gang’s estimated three dozen commando-level terrorists who were caught over the years and sentenced to life in prison have since been released on parole. Only six remained jailed before Klump’s arrest, the federal prosecutor’s office said.