Knut Folkerts

Knut Detlef Folkerts (born 1 January 1952 in Singen, West Germany) is a former member of the terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF).

The German authorities offered Folkerts a new identity in the USA and one million Deutschmarks if he agreed to betray the hiding place of Hanns Martin Schleyer.

On 31 July 1980 he was sentenced in Stuttgart to two life terms in prison for the murder of public prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his two bodyguards, for forming a terrorist organisation and for the robbery at the firearms business in Frankfurt am Main.

[3] In May 2007 Folkerts said in an interview with Spiegel magazine, that he knew about the Red Army Faction plan to kill Siegfried Buback, but he was not directly involved.

The lawyer Michael RosenthaI, interviewed by the news magazine Der Spiegel in 2007, reiterated doubts about the reliability of witnesses who had testified to having seen Folkerts at the scene of the crime.

On 28 December 2007 the investigating judges of the German Federal Court of Justice made a Coercive Detention Order of up to six months against the former RAF members Knut Folkerts, Christian Klar and Brigitte Mohnhaupt.

Passport photograph of Knut Folkerts
Memorial plate for policeman Arie Kranenburg in Utrecht