Germany:A former Red Army Faction member convicted of the 1985 murder of an American soldier and the bombing of a US base has been freed after serving 21 years of her life sentence, a German court said yesterday.
Eva Haule, the second member of the radical left-wing group to win parole this year, was convicted by a Stuttgart court in 1988 of membership of a terrorist organisation and weapons possession. That conviction related to a failed 1984 attack on a Nato facility in Bavaria.
In 1994, a Frankfurt court found Haule guilty of killing Edward Pimental, a 20-year-old US army soldier, who died after he left a discotheque with a woman on August 7th, 1985, in the western German city of Wiesbaden.
Authorities said the terrorists used Pimental's ID card to enter the US Rhein-Main air base in Frankfurt. The next day, explosives packed in a Volkswagen rocked the parking lot behind the base. Two Americans were killed and 23 people were injured.
Haule was convicted on three counts of murder as well as bringing about an explosion.
The court said its decision to parole Haule, a Red Army Faction member from 1984-1986, was influenced by the fact that "she actively participated in the self-dissolution of the RAF in 1998 and convincingly made clear that she no longer views violence in the formed of armed fighting as an appropriate method to achieve political aims".
- (AP)