Monday, Jun. 05, 1972

More Bonnie und Clyde

Along with its weekly casualty figures from Viet Nam, the Pentagon may soon be forced to release a similar periodic list from West Germany. Two enlisted men and an officer were killed and five people injured last week when bombs hidden in parked cars exploded at Campbell Barracks in Heidelberg, headquarters of U.S. Army, Europe.

Two weeks earlier another officer was killed and 13 people were injured in a similar bombing at U.S. 5th Army Corps headquarters in Frankfurt.

As it happened, the bombings were not restricted to U.S. installations. Explosions were set off recently at police headquarters in Augsburg and Munich and the Hamburg publishing house of Press Lord Axel Springer. The wife of a supreme court justice in Karlsruhe narrowly escaped death when a bomb exploded as she started up her car.

All the bombings appear to be tied to the notorious criminal gang led by West Germany's "Bonnie und Clyde" --sometime Journalist Ulrike Meinhof, 37, and Student Revolutionary Andreas Baader, 29 (TIME, Feb. 7). Meinhof and Baader, whose previous exploits included bank robberies, car thefts and shoot-outs with police, took credit for bombing the Army headquarters in Frankfurt. The explosion, they said in a message to the press, was intended as a protest against the Army's "extermination strategies in Viet Nam." Anarchist groups known to sympathize with the Baader-Meinhof gang claimed credit for three of the other terrorist acts. Though nobody has yet declared himself responsible for the attack on the justice's wife, it so happens that her husband had been directing an investigation of the gang. Moreover, police revealed that all the bombs had been made from pieces of heavy steel pipe stuffed with explosives--precisely the kind of pipe discovered by the cops when they raided a Hamburg hideout of the Baader-Meinhof gang in March.

In their hunt for the bombers, police flashed photographs of 19 alleged gang members on TV screens across the nation. A total of $60,000 in rewards was offered, but by week's end no new leads had been found.

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