It was on Tuesday evening that passengers on the high-speed train ICE from Bonn to Berlin noticed a man who they thought looked like Garweg – who was in the company of a woman and a dog – and called the police.
The special task force GSG9 intervened and arrested the man at Berlin-Spandau railway station, despite both he and the woman claiming that they had never had anything to do with RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang.
On Wednesday, German media reported the news that Garweg had been arrested. But a few hours later, the prosecutor announced that the identification of the arrested man had concluded that he was innocent, and is now being released.
RAF instilled fear in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s with their terrorist acts. The hunt for them has become highly topical again since member Daniela Klette was arrested earlier this year when police stormed an apartment in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin.
She had then been on the run for more than three decades. Accomplices Ernst-Volker Staub and – it turns out – Burkhard Garweg are still at large.
The group was behind, among other things, the bombing of the West German embassy in Stockholm in 1975.
