Attacking the Terrorists

A shootout in Holland, and 1,000 surprises in Germany

Dutch police had been watching the apartment building in Amsterdam's working-class Osdorp section for days. During the search for kidnaped Millionaire Maurits Caransa, who was seized late last month and released five days later, authorities discovered that two young West German terrorists were living at Baden Powell Road 217. Though the Germans were not wanted in the Caransa case, one was suspected of having a role in the murder of West German Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the other of involvement in the bombing of a German regional courthouse.

At 11 p.m. one evening last week, five hours after Dutch police had staked out the apartment, the Germans emerged. They walked to a phone booth a few blocks away. Ten heavily armed plainclothesmen followed 100 yds. behind. Finally one policeman approached them and said: "I want to make a call too." One of the terrorists replied, "Shut up. A moment, please"--and then opened fire with a pistol. The police countered with a barrage of shots until the terrorists fell to the pavement badly wounded. Still the Germans continued to shoot back for some time and one even managed to toss a hand grenade before they could be subdued.

In capturing the pair, Gert Richard Schneider, 28, and Christoph Michael Wackernagel, 26, a former movie actor who is the video expert for the Red Army gang, the Dutch had managed a feat that has so far eluded a whole army of German policemen. After Schleyer's body was found in the trunk of an abandoned car last month, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt ordered up his country's biggest postwar man hunt to track down the 16 Red Army gang members suspected of involvement in kidnaping and murder. Some 80,000 policemen have been thrown into the search--manning roadblocks, border crossings and airports all over Germany, as well as raiding suspect apartments, bars and nightclubs in several cities.

The German search for the terrorists has failed--at least so far--but police have collared 1,000 common criminals wanted on charges as varied as murder, rape, auto theft, burglary and dope peddling. In Koblenz, police raided a warehouse in search of terrorists--and surprised a gang of car thieves. At a roadblock in Hildesheim, a town 18 miles outside Hannover, police searched a car and found wigs, rubber masks and two pistols; the occupants confessed they were on their way to rob a bank. In the fashionable Gruenewald section of West Berlin, a brothel operator griped about a sudden shortage of customers: "Clients don't like it when the place is crawling with cops. The girls are getting lonely."

At week's end the West German government received another embarrassing shock. Ingrid Schubert, 32, one of eleven jailed terrorists whose release had been demanded by Schleyer's kidnapers, was found dead in her Munich prison cell. She had apparently hanged herself. Schubert was the fourth terrorist to die in West German custody within the past month.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.