This period was marked by a series of attacks by the Red Army Faction (RAF), a far-left militant group designated as a terrorist organization by the West German government.

RAF member Susanne Albrecht, who knew Ponto personally, visited him accompanied by Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar.

As the German government did not give in to the blackmail—unlike with the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz two years earlier—terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), allied with the Red Army Faction (RAF), tried to increase the pressure by hijacking the Lufthansa plane "Landshut" on 13 October 1977.

After an odyssey through the Middle East and the murder of the pilot, Captain Jürgen Schumann, the plane landed at Mogadishu International Airport, the capital of Somalia.

[4] Shortly afterward, in the early morning hours of 18 October 1977, known as the "Night of death in Stammheim", RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, who were imprisoned in Stuttgart-Stammheim supermax prison, reportedly took their own lives.

His body was found on the evening of 19 October in the trunk of a green Audi 100 GL, parked on a side street in Mulhouse, Alsace, France, close to the German and Swiss border.

[7] Despite these differences, at the beginning of the Schleyer kidnapping, Chancellor Schmidt convened the so-called Great Crisis Committee (Großer Krisenstab), which included members of all parliamentary groups in the West German Bundestag.