BKA – Bundeskriminalamt [Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany]

Athens, Greece: On an international day of action in solidarity with the arrested comrade D.Klette and comrades E.Staub and B.Garweg, who are persecuted as members of the RAF

Posted on 2024/05/07 by darknights

On Sunday, 14/4, responding to the call of the International Red Aid on an international day of action in solidarity with the arrested comrade D.Klette and comrades E.Staub and B.Garweg, who are persecuted as members of the RAF, we held a solidarity gathering outside the German embassy. The gathering lasted about an hour, with the comrades that participated shouting slogans. The banner was opened on Loukianou Street and leaflets were distributed.

The text of the intervention:

On February 26, 2024, after 34 years of living illegally, Daniela Klette was arrested, accused of participating in the Red Army Faction (RAF), as well as for a series of bank robberies after the dissolution of the organization in 1998. At the same time, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has launched a manhunt across Germany for Ernst Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg. Ernst Volker Staub had been imprisoned as a member of the RAF in the 1980s and had participated in the organization’s hunger strike in German prisons in 1984.

After his release in 1988, German authorities in early 1990 issued arrest warrants for Staub, Garweg, and Klette, due to which all three went into hiding. The warrants are based on DNA samples and connect the comrades with the armed attack on the U.S. embassy in Bonn in February 1991 and the bombing attack and destruction of the under-construction Weiterstadt prison in March 1993. After the dissolution of the organization in March 1998, all three continued to live in hiding, and law enforcement authorities continued to search for them, linking them again through DNA and fingerprints to robberies of money transports and banks in various parts of Germany. Information about how the authorities reached Klette’s arrest are unclear, as the police themselves do not clearly state how they tracked her down. It is rumored that they collaborated with journalists from the investigative site Bellingcat, who, through an artificial intelligence program, identified old photos of Klette’s arrests with current photos of her on social media, as well as an anonymous tip from an informant in November 2023.

The German state continues its relentless pursuit of those who participated or are accused of participating in the organization, as if 26 years have not passed since the dissolution of the RAF. The message is clear: the state will never forget those who resist, rebel, and revolt. Prosecutions therefore aim beyond the capture of the three, to disciplining and terrorizing those who resist today, those inspired by the struggle waged by the RAF in the heart of the beast in previous decades. In the case of the three persecuted comrades, we see another campaign of terrorism and slander against the organization and the solidarity movement.

This campaign is nothing new, as for decades the German state, in close cooperation with the establishment media, has been trying desperately to dissolve what they call the “myth of the RAF,” which is nothing but the social and political legitimization of the organizations of the competitive movement of European metropolises, something that is alive and well today, as evidenced by the fact that accused members have been untraceable for three decades. Today’s reality, moreover, proves that things would be better if the global wave of rebellion, of which the RAF was a part, had succeeded. In a situation where European states are militarizing, political power becomes increasingly reactionary, societies are impoverished, and Western imperialism once again shows its teeth, bloodthirsty in Gaza, the struggles waged inside and outside prisons in European metropolises become relevant as ever.

WHOEVER FORGETS THE PRISONERS OF WAR FORGETS THE WAR ITSELF

FREEDOM TO CAPTURED COMRADE DANIELA KLETTE

SOLIDARITY WITH THE PERSECUTED COMRADES ERNST VOLKER STAUB AND BURKHARD GARWEG

Solidarity assembly with the imprisoned, fugitive, and persecuted militants

Via & translated by Act for freedom now!

Pößneck, Germany: “It is better to commit a disorder…”.

Posted on 2024/05/03 by darknights

The small town of Pößneck, some 30 km south of the city of Jena (Thuringia), is not known for its antics, to say the least.

Unlike its little sister, Jena’s walls have, over the centuries, endured the fury of peasant rebels who, between 1524 and 1526, destroyed and pillaged hundreds of castles and religious buildings in the Holy Roman Empire. This insurrection, dubbed the “Uprising of the Common Man” (Erhebung des gemeinen Mannes) or more simply the “Peasants’ War” following Engels’ study, even aroused the ire of the Pope of Protestantism, Martin Luther, who advised the nobility to slaughter the 300,000 insurgent beggars to the last man. In his pamphlet entitled Contre les hordes de paysans voleurs et assassins (May 1525) (Against the hordes of thieving, murderous peasants), Luther wrote: “Let all who can, strike, kill and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that there is nothing more poisonous, harmful or diabolical than a rebel. It’s like when you have to kill a rabid dog: if you don’t hit him, he’ll hit you, and a whole country with you.”

But today, the good city of Jena is best known in the textbooks of domination as having been one of the cradles of German Romanticism, whose university saw Goethe and prestigious teachers such as Fichte, Schiller and Hegel pass through, not to mention a famous student, Karl Marx, who completed his doctorate in philosophy there in 1841. A little later, it was also here that Ernst Haeckel, patent eugenicist and inventor of the term “ecology” in 1866 (preferred to “mesology” by the anarchist Elisée Reclus), made his career. However, it would be a pity to remain in the academic sky of bourgeois ideas in 19th-century Jena, without mentioning another, lesser-known revolt that brought the city down to earth.

In June 1953, after the first strikes against increased work rates, when the insurrection broke out in East Berlin against red fascism before being crushed by the tanks of the Army of the same color, it’s easy to forget that a large part of the former East Germany rose up. In Jena itself, for example, a crowd of 30,000 people attacked and ransacked the headquarters of the Communist Party (SED) and several official buildings, as well as looting the headquarters of the political police (the Stasi) and storming the Steiger prison, forcibly releasing some sixty inmates. Needless to say, the welders and other coal-mining delegates who had tried to mediate with the Party pundits to present them with a few reasonable demands, ended up either in front of a firing squad or in prison for a very long time. But wasn’t it the poet who had helped illuminate Jena, author of Faust and statesman decorated with the Legion of Honor by Napoleon himself, Johann Wolfang Von Goethe, who had professed this pinnacle of authoritarian cynicism destined to pass into posterity: “I’d rather commit injustice than tolerate [public] disorder”? Continue reading “Pößneck, Germany: “It is better to commit a disorder…”.” →

Greece: Thanos Chatziangelou | 9/5/76 – ‘Living hearts in dead wings’

Posted on 2023/05/14 by darknights

Political tribute of the imprisoned member of Anarchist Action Thanos Chatziangelou on the 47th anniversary of the murder of RAF fighter Ulrike Meinhof.

Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.

Ulrike Meinhof

9 May 1976

RAF fighter Ulrike Meinhof is murdered in Stammheim solitary confinement. This is preceded by the murder of hunger striker Holger Meins, who was constantly subjected to force-feeding, and a year later Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe are murdered in Stammheim solitary confinement cells, and Ingrid Schubert is murdered in Stadelheim.

The fighter Ulrike Meinhof was a revolutionary, flesh and blood of the armed anti-imperialist struggle, born and died on the path of contributing to the struggle for individual and collective liberation. She abandoned legitimacy during action to free the imprisoned revolutionary Andreas Baader and became an organizational member of the first generation of the Red Army Faction.

She was a charismatic person who balanced theory through practice, playing a leading role in both the theoretical formulation of the RAF’s ideological and political line, without ever leaving the operational field of armed metropolitan resistance. It was a key part of those initiatives that carried the legacy of the Latin American guerrilla movements on their backs, building the armed ‘metropolitan front’ in the European centres. Who took the hostilities to the “heart of the beast”, putting solidarity into practice with the peoples of Vietnam, Palestine and the third world countries that were fired upon by the imperialist interventions of the United States.

At a time when Schmidt’s German chancellery was an imperialist centre of decision-making and operations, carrying Nazi droplets in the mechanisms of power, the flourishing of the urban guerrilla put into practical question and annulment both the regime’s omnipotence and the oppositional tolerance of imperialist crimes by the reformist left. The history of revolt and resistance was written in the blood of those tortured in the internment hellholes, those murdered in ambushes and anti-terrorist operations by the special SoKo B/M department of the Federal Criminal Investigation Service – BKA and those executed in the death wings of the sensory isolation cells.

Comrade Ulrike was just that disobedient star. Her theoretical and practical contribution to the birth of the armed struggle in Germany and the unification of the resistances in Europe and the Middle East categorized her as a central target for elimination in the BKA’s lists. From slandering her political integrity and standing, to spreading false news of her death while she was struggling in an illegal regime, to her exterminating treatment in the isolation of the dead ward, the social democratic chancellery initiated Ulrike’s execution in the Stammheim hellhole, citing the obviousness of suicide. Indeed, state revanchism was not content with Ulrike’s death, desecrating her dead body when it removed her brain in secret to conduct investigations.

Revolutionary history is written in blood and gunpowder. In this history, personalities like Ulrike and the other RAF comrades are taken out of the matrix of the class struggle for social liberation. They stand unscathed, translucent through time like the brightest stars, with the same integrity that challenges and denigrates the monopoly of tyranny. The life and death of comrades and comrades like Ulrike are a cry to the rebellious hearts that yearn for the enduring revolutionary necessity, deafeningly declaring themselves to their persecutors: I was, am and will be.

Honour to our comrades Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, Andreas Baader, Ingrid Schubert who were murdered in the sensory isolation cells by the German state.

Honour to our comrades Petra Schelm, Georg Von Rauch, Thomas Weissbecker, Katharina Hammerschmidt, Ulrich Wessel, Siegfried Hausner, Werner Sauber, Brigitte Kuhlmann, Wilfriend Böse, Willi-Peter Stoll, Michael Knoll, Elisabeth Von Dyck, Juliane Plambeck, Wolfgang Beer, Sigurd Debus, Johannes Thimme, Jürgen Peemoller, Ina Zipman, Gert Albartus, Wolfgang Grams who dedicated their lives to the anti-imperialist struggle for liberation through the ranks of the German urban guerrilla .

“Behind all of us lies a common history – we will meet again on the unknown and complicated paths of liberation.”

Thanos Chatziangelou, captured member of the Anarchist Action Organization

C’ Wing, Larissa Prison

9/5/2023

Source: athens.indymedia

Who wrote that?

Posted on 2023/03/18 by darknights

2020

by Zündlumpen #76

Languages: German • English • French
Download: PDF (read, A4 booklet, letter booklet) • TEXT

A brief overview of modern forensic linguistics methods for determining authorship.

The following article tries to give an overview from a non-technical perspective and to make a corresponding evaluation. There are some academic publications on this topic that could be evaluated for a better assessment. However, my main purpose here is just to raise the issue, not to provide a sound and conclusive view so if you know anything more, publish it!

Avoiding traces that could be your undoing down the road – perhaps even after years or decades – is probably of interest to most people who occasionally commit a crime and come into conflict with the law. Avoiding fingerprints, avoiding DNA traces, avoiding shoe prints and textile fiber traces or at least disposing of clothing afterwards, avoiding surveillance cameras, avoiding tool traces, avoiding recordings of any kind, recognizing surveillance, etc. – all this should be a concern for anyone who commits crimes from time to time and wants to protect themselves from identification. But what about those traces that often arise only after a crime has been committed, out of the urge to explain one’s deed anonymously or even by using a recurring pseudonym? When writing and publishing a communiqué?

My impression is that in many cases no special attention is paid to these traces despite a rapid technological development of analytical capacities. This may be intentional, negligent, or a compromise of competing needs. Without wishing to make a general suggestion here on how to deal with these traces – after all, everyone must determine that for themselves – I would like to outline the methods the investigative authorities in Germany and elsewhere are currently (probably) working with, what seems possible in theory, and what could become possible in the future.

Perhaps I should note in advance that everything or at least most of what I present here is scientifically as well as legally controversial. I am also less interested in the legal validity of linguistic analyses – and not in the scientific one either – than in whether it seems plausible that these investigations could guide a surveillance effort, because even if a trail is not useful in court by itself, it could still lead to other, useful trails. Continue reading “Who wrote that?” →

Germany: All my friends are bad kids! – about a (meanwhile discontinued) §129-proceeding against anarchists in Hamburg and Bremen

Posted on 2022/10/22 - 2022/10/22 by darknights

In the following we want to inform you about a procedure according to §129 in Hamburg and Bremen, describe the collective handling of it and give space to individual voices of affected people.

In summer, some people in Hamburg and Bremen opened their mailboxes and there they were again: letters from the Chief Public Prosecutor Schakau of the General Prosecutor’s Office in Hamburg. From 26.05.2020 to 25.07.2022 investigations of different authorities in a §129-procedure against anarchists in Hamburg and Bremen took place. It was about an association construct to which direct actions, mainly in Hamburg, should be assigned over a longer period of time.
Three of the five people against whom the investigations were mainly directed had already been convicted in 2020 in the so-called Parkbank proceedings and were the three official defendants in these proceedings. In the course of the investigation, two other people were selected as potential members of the constructed association, who were similarly investigated.
It all starts (for us) with a report from the BKA to the Attorney General’s Office suggesting proceedings under §129a (formation of a terrorist organization) against the three defendants. However, this is rejected by Attorney General Geilhorn, as are proceedings under §129 (formation of a criminal organization) at the federal level.
One day later, proceedings under §129 begin in Hamburg, led by Chief Public Prosecutor Schakau. In the course of these investigations, measures are initiated against all five suspects of membership; these run from the beginning of May to the beginning of August 2021 and include observations with photo and video recordings, telecommunications surveillance (tapping telephone conversations and reading text messages), the use of IMSI catchers and silent text messages, as well as Internet surveillance (especially the reading of all known and accessible e-mail inboxes).

In the course of this, a large part of the environments of the five defendants were investigated and a large number of people were affected by almost all of the measures. In this context, it should be mentioned that there were at least two people who were not constructed as (potential) members, whose phones were tapped separately with harebrained explanations. It should also be mentioned that the observations and wiretapping measures took place across federal states (Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Bavaria and Saxony) and in several cases by administrative assistance also in other European countries (Austria, Belgium and Spain).
Ultimately, the proceedings are discontinued on 25.07.2022, officially for lack of evidence. “Officially”, because of course – as we know – parallel surveillance against some defendants also took place according to other paragraphs, also under the sign of police “danger defense”. A more detailed processing of the investigations in the sense of “files for all” will be given elsewhere and at a later time. Continue reading “Germany: All my friends are bad kids! – about a (meanwhile discontinued) §129-proceeding against anarchists in Hamburg and Bremen” →