Germany's 'Red Zora' terrorist spared jail

A leading member of Germany's Red Zora feminist terrorist gang that bombed sex shops and firms deemed to exploit women in the Seventies and Eighties was sentenced to a two-year suspended jail term yesterday after being on the run for 19 years.

Adrienne Gershäuser, 58, a woman who once operated under the pseudonym Lea and ranked as one of Germany's most militant feminists, returned from self-imposed exile and turned herself in to federal prosecutors in December last year after hiding from police abroad.

Under a deal with German justice authorities, Gershäuser was found guilty of being a member of a militant terrorist organisation, but sentenced to only a suspended jail term by a Berlin court because she had co-operated fully with prosecutors, police and the courts.

Prosecutors agreed to a minimum sentence, mainly because unlike Germany's other 1970s left-wing terrorist gangs, Red Zora successfully ensured that no one was harmed in the 45 attacks the organisation carried out between 1977 and 1995.

Germany has been recently making a kind of peace with its militant left-wing past. Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a former leader of the ultra violent Red Army Faction terrorist organisation, was freed on probation in February having served 24 years in prison, the mandatory minimum for the five life sentences she was given after being arrested in 1982.

By Red Army Faction standards, the activities of Red Zora were tame. But out of all of Germany's left-wing guerrilla groups, Red Zora was undoubtedly the most bizarre. The movement took its name from a book written in 1941, which tells the story of a red-haired Croatian girl called Red Zora who commands a gang of orphans committed to righting injustice.

With its black five-pointed star flag displaying the female symbol, Red Zora began life in 1977 as the feminist arm of the more violent Revolutionary Cells left-wing terrorist organisation, which saw itself as a rival to the Red Army Faction.

Committed to an urban guerrilla war against what it considered to be the ingrained sexism of 1970s Germany, Red Zora's started its string of attacks with a bomb planted outside the offices of the German Doctors Association to protest against the country's rigid abortion laws. Attacks on sex shops, cinemas and the offices of major German industrial concerns such as Bayer and Siemens followed.

Red Zora split from the Revolutionary Cells in 1986, having become disillusioned with the violent methods of other left-wing groups. It launched a campaign that was designed not to harm, carrying out its last attack on a Bremen shipyard in 1995.

Its activists were part-time guerrillas, known as "after-work terrorists " because most had middle-class jobs and carried out their attacks in their free time. Gershäuser worked as a schoolteacher and later trained as a radio technician. She became involved in the German feminist movement in the early 1980s and was put in touch with members of the Red Zora gang.

She bought alarm clocks that were used as time switches for the organisation's bombs, but the alarm clocks were all from the same manufacturer. Gerhäuser was identified as a Red Zora member when the German Federal Criminal Bureau (FCB) instructed the clock-maker to number its alarm clocks and set up cameras at every dealership. She was photographed purchasing an alarm clock at a shop in Dortmund two days before she planted a bomb at Berlin's Institute of Genetic Research.

She fled Germany after receiving a tip off that the FCB was after her. At her trial, Gershäuser refused to say where she had spent the past 19 years. She said she had managed to eke out a living doing "occasional work" as a photographer, dismissing as "absurd" suggestions that she had first fled to East Germany.

Her lawyer said she had decided to return to Germany because she "was fed up living abroad with false passports" and wanted to put her " revolutionary past" firmly behind her.

Gershäuser left court yesterday to resume a normal life, her militant past a tiny footnote in history. Yet Red Zora's reputation seems destined to live on. Montenegro, a state newly emerged from the tragedy of the Balkans, has made the story of the daring orphan girl the subject of its first full-length feature film. It is due to reach cinema screens this autumn.