Terrorism Target for the Red Army Faction

By David Brand

Bad Homburg, an elite spa north of Frankfurt, is home to many of West Germany's top executives and bankers. Last Thursday morning the most eminent of the lot, Alfred Herrhausen, 59, chief executive of Deutsche Bank and personal economic adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, left his home at the usual time, shortly after 8:30 a.m., and set out for Frankfurt's financial district in his armored, chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz 500SE, escorted by two other automobiles with four bodyguards. The car had traveled 550 yds. along a tree-lined street when a tremendous explosion hurled it into the air, reducing it to a charred, smoking hulk. Herrhausen died instantly.

& As police poured into the area, a small wooden box containing a detonator was found in a nearby park. The box apparently had been connected by cable to a bomb attached to a bicycle parked on the limousine's route. Police say the bomb included a light-sensitive device that triggered the explosion precisely as Herrhausen's limousine passed by. Under the box was a piece of paper with the all too familiar star-shaped symbol superimposed on a drawing of a Kalashnikov rifle: the trademark of West Germany's ultra-leftist urban terrorists, the Red Army Faction.

Suddenly, three years after its last assassination, the R.A.F. had roared back into life with the murder of West Germany's most influential captain of finance. Herrhausen ran the country's largest bank (assets: $165 billion), maintained close ties with Soviet and East European officials and was an outspoken advocate of German unification. Only last spring the weekly Der Spiegel dubbed him "the Lord of Money."

The federal prosecutor named as possible suspects Christoph Seidler, 31, and Horst Meyer, 30, both believed to be R.A.F. commandos. A third man, as yet unnamed, is also a suspect.

Most puzzling to the police was why now, with most of its hard-core members dead or serving long prison terms and its extreme left-wing ideology on the wane, the group had chosen to strike. There is still a commando group of about 15 members at large in West Germany. Some security experts doubt that the Herrhausen murder signals a new wave of R.A.F. terror. But, declared Heinrich Boge, head of the Bundeskriminalamt, which coordinates federal criminal investigations, "there was never any indication that they were giving up."

Since taking over as Deutsche Bank's sole chief executive in May 1988, Herrhausen had aggressively begun to change the bank, the world's 20th largest, from an insular institution to a global financial power. Only last week he made a $1.4 billion takeover bid for the British merchant bank Morgan Grenfell Group PLC. Throughout his life, Herrhausen viewed himself as a man driven by destiny to lead West Germany to new heights as a world economic power. It was a mission that was brutally shattered on a street in Bad Homburg last Thursday morning.

With reporting by Ken Olsen/Bonn