German Minister's killer friend pardoned
A friend of German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was pardoned today after serving only two years of a nine year sentence for three terrorist murders.
Hans-Joachim Klein, who took part in a 1975 attack, led by Carlos the Jackal, on an Opec oil ministers’ meeting, was freed after clemency requests by “several citizens,”.
A Frankfurt court convicted Klein in 2001 on three counts of murder and three of attempted murder and hostage-taking after a trial where Fischer – a Klein friend from their student radical days 30 years ago – appeared as a witness.
Klein admitted taking part in the attack on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna but denied shooting anyone.
The attack allegedly was led by Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Those killed were an Opec employee, an Iraqi bodyguard and an Austrian policeman.
The Hesse state justice ministry did not reveal who had sought clemency for Klein.
lein, who belonged to the Revolutionary Cells terror group, renounced terrorism in a 1977 interview with a German magazine but was on the run for 23 years until police captured him in 1998 in a French village where he had been living under an assumed name.
With time spent in French and German custody before his sentencing, Klein would have been eligible for parole in May after serving two thirds of his term.
He was placed in a work-release programme in September, holding an outside job but returning to his cell at night.
Klein said during his trial that he first came into contact with Carlos through the Revolutionary Cells, one of several terrorist groups that tried to destabilise Germany in the 1970s with bombings and other attacks.
Fischer, who went on to become a prominent member of the Greens party and finally a Cabinet member, testified about his own role in the Frankfurt militant scene and said he had urged Klein to renounce violence.
