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Hans-Joachim Klein

Hans-Joachim Klein (1947-9 November 2022), also known as Angie, was a member of the Revolutionary Cells and one of the hostage-takers in the OPEC siege of December 1975. He later resigned from being a guerrilla and was paroled in 2003, living in Normandy, France afterwards.

Biography[]

Hans-Joachim Klein was born in 1947, and he was sent to a foster home after his mother, a Ravensbruck concentration camp survivor, killed herself, but his father took custody over him after he remarried and abused him. Klein worked with the legal team for the Red Army Faction in the 1970s before becoming a guerrilla, training in South Yemen and joining the Revolutionary Cells in 1975. In December, he joined Carlos the Jackal, Gabriele Kroecher-Tiedemann, and Anis Naccache in the OPEC siege in Vienna, Austria, and he was wounded in the chest by a bullet fired by Austrian police who tried to storm the building. After the failure of the operation, Klein decided that he wanted to resign from the cause and turned in his gun, resignation letter, and information on other terrorists to Associated Press. He went into hiding, and in September 1998 he was arrested in Normandy, France. He was paroled in 2003 after being sentenced to 14 years in prison, and he lived in Normandy afterwards. He died in 2022 at the age of 74.

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