STUTTGART, Germany, March 1 (UPI) -- German authorities say they will not ease prison conditions for a former terrorist after he wrote a message indicating he hasn't given up his radical views.
Christian Klar, a former member of the Red Army Faction, an anti-capitalist terror group that caused havoc in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, is hoping to be released after Germany last month granted parole to Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a leading terrorist of the RAF.
Because his official parole time doesn't arrive until March 2009, Klar has asked German President Horst Koehler to sign a pardon request, a move the president said he was seriously considering. Klar was convicted of murder in five cases and sentenced to life in prison, which in Germany carries a minimum sentence of 25 years.
While unclear whether Klar would get out ahead of time, he was almost surely to be granted lax inmate conditions, with a possibility to venture outside the prison under guard. Yet Ulrich Goll, the justice minister in Baden-Wuerttemberg, the state where Klar is detained, suspended these plans after it surfaced that Klar had sent a radical message to a leftist conference in Berlin.
At the conference in January, a far-left politician read Klar's message, in which he said it was now time to "finalize the defeat of the capital and open the door for a different future."
He went on to denounce an "imperial alliance" in Europe, which "allows itself to castigate any country on earth which opposes being reformed for today's redistribution of profits and turns its entire societal being into a pile of rubble."
The commentary has also made an early release from prison highly unlikely.
