The Old Lady and the Terrorists

Policemen in the German-Swiss border town of Singen were not particularly alarmed last week when an excited old lady marched in to say that she had sighted a pair of terrorists in a local cafe. Since a massive man hunt was launched last month for the assassins of Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback, West German police stations have been swamped with mistaken reports of sightings of three revolutionaries who are wanted for shooting Buback, his chauffeur and a bodyguard in a deadly spray of machine-gun fire.

Wrong Turn. Nonetheless, two Singen officers ambled down to the Cafe Hanser for a routine check of the report. There, composedly eating breakfast at a table, were a young man with a huge drooping moustache and a thin-lipped blonde. Asked for his identity papers, the man led the policemen into a nearby parking area. Reaching into his rucksack, he pulled out a sawed-off submachine gun, shot one of the officers in the chest and wounded the other in the arm. Commandeering an Opel at gunpoint from a passing motorist, he and his companion sped off in the direction of the highway to Stuttgart. As three carloads of Singen police gave chase, the pair took a wrong turn that brought them to a dead-end barrier near a brook. In the ensuing battle, a policeman grabbed the fleeing man's submachine gun and wounded the woman in the leg. The man was shot in the head. Ballistic tests later showed that the same gun had been used in the Buback murders.

As the suspected killer lay dying in a Singen hospital last week, he was identified as Guenter Sonnenberg, 22, the No. 1 fugitive on West Germany's "Most Wanted" list. His companion, Verena Becker, 24, is now in West Germany's top security prison in Stammheim. Both had been involved with the terrorist Red Army Faction founded by Ulrike Meinhof, who hanged herself in prison last year, and Andreas Baader, who was sentenced to life imprisonment last month (TIME, May 9). Responsible for a series of "anti-imperialist" bank heists, bombings of U.S. Army bases in Germany and the assassinations of public officials, the Baader-Meinhof gang has been a scourge for nearly a decade.

A late recruit to the Baader-Meinhof revolutionary cause, Sonnenberg had previously been arrested for demonstrating in a courtroom against prison conditions for convicted terrorists. Becker was a professional revolutionary. First jailed in 1972 for helping to bomb a British boating club in West Berlin, she was one of five imprisoned terrorists released in exchange for kidnaped politician Peter Lorenz, who was abducted in 1975 while running for mayor in Berlin. Flown to the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen by the Bonn government, Becker reportedly took courses in hijacking and other terrorist skills at a training camp run by the Marxist, militantly anti-Israel Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Police found pistols, revolvers and a stiletto in the captured couple's rucksacks, as well as train tickets to Zurich and several forged identity documents. Authorities suspect that Sonnenberg and Becker had been bringing the arms and documents to a secret meeting of terrorists in Switzerland when they were recognized from newspaper photos by the sharp-eyed old lady in Singen. German and Swiss police were on high-priority alert last week as they searched for two other suspects in the Buback assassination conspiracy.

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