German ex-Baader-Meinhof Militants Suspected in Botched Robbery

Three alleged German far-left militants armed with automatic weapons are believed to be behind a failed robbery of a money transporter, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Investigators found DNA at the crime scene matching that of three fugitives of the disbanded Red Army Faction (RAF), they said.

The anti-capitalist RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, emerged out of the late 1960s student protest movement and rocked Germany with a wave of bombings, killings and kidnappings targeting political and business leaders that lasted to the early 1990s.

In last June's attempted robbery, masked gunmen armed with AK-47 automatic rifles and a grenade-launcher opened fire but fled without cash when security guards locked themselves inside the armored vehicle. 

The three suspects, wanted on attempted murder and robbery charges, were Daniela Klette, 57, Ernst-Volker Wilhelm Staub, 61, and Burkhard Garweg, 47, prosecutors said.

"There is no evidence to suggest... a terrorist background," said the Lower Saxony state prosecutors. "Rather it must be presumed the crime aimed to help finance their underground lives."

No one was injured in the attack near the northern city of Bremen.

Police said the assailants may have used a jamming device to disable mobile phone communications of the two guards driving the security van which was carrying about one million euros ($1.1 million).

All three fugitives have long been suspects in a 1993 explosives attack against a prison in Hesse state and other attacks by the RAF, which declared in 1998 it had disbanded.