On the run for 30 years, caught in half an hour

Last Wednesday Berlin police raided the apartment of a well-liked 65 year-old woman fond of capoeira, the Brazilian martial art. They arrested her, took away a hand grenade, a grenade launcher and a Kalashnikov machine gun, and identified her as Daniella Klette, a former member of the Red Army Faction (founded as the Baader Meinhof gang) who'd been on the run for 30 years. The police called her arrest a masterpiece and a milestone but it's unclear how much of the sleuthing was their own, and how much that of a Bellingcat journalist who'd found her in 30 minutes on the internet. The journalist, Michael Colborne, simply plugged an old picture of Klette into an online facial recognition service and found a match living under an assumed name in a block of flats in Kreuzberg. Why hadn't police tried this? Possibly because of strict German data protection laws that, for example, bar the authorities from surreptitiously recording even known organised crime operatives if there's a risk of recording others too. The hard-left Red Army Faction is now history. Hard-right extremists are two-a-penny and extremely hard for Germany to keep track of. Colborne thinks a rule-change is in order.