This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Dutch police have told people to be on the lookout for three German far-left militants who have been at large for decades and suspected of a string of recent heists.

Ernst-Volker Staub, 61, Burkhard Garweg, 47, and 57-year-old Daniela Klette are former members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), which sowed terror in the 1970s and 80s in a campaign of bombings, kidnappings and killings.

The three are wanted for a spate of robberies on money transporters and at least six supermarket heists.

“Police have reason to believe that the three are living in the Netherlands,” a statement said. “Crimes were committed on the Dutch-German border, they have not yet been detained in Germany and a mobile phone belonging to one of the fugitives was switched off in the Netherlands.”

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Between €46,000 and €100,000 were stolen in each holdup – except on 7 May, when the robbers escaped with a guard’s firearm but no cash, and on 6 June.

On that day another cash-in-transit van was attacked with an AK-47 assault rifle. The raiders fled without taking any cash, police said.

Detectives are focusing on the Netherlands where the three may be living on a small secluded farm or anonymously in a city, “constantly changing from home to home and pretending to be tourists … The fugitives are armed and dangerous and should by no means be approached when spotted,” the police said.

The three are among a wider group of fugitives still on the run for membership of the anti-capitalist RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, which emerged out of the radicalised fringe of the 1960s student protest movement.

The group, which had links to Middle Eastern militant organisations, declared itself disbanded in 1998.

Staub, Garweg and Klette, alleged members of the RAF’s “third generation” active during the 80s and 90s, are chief suspects in a 1993 explosives attack against a prison under construction in Hesse state, central Germany.

In the assault, five RAF members climbed the prison walls, abducted the guards in a van, then returned to set off explosives that caused about €600,000 of property damage, according to German prosecutors.

Klette is also a suspect in two previous RAF operations.