Word: herrhausen
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...leadership of 15 to 20 people retains considerable destructive force. Over the past five years the R.A.F., a successor to the feared Baader-Meinhof gang, has attempted to assassinate six leading West German figures -- and succeeded four times. Eight months ago, the group killed Deutsche Bank chief executive Alfred Herrhausen, a personal adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, by exploding a bomb along a street as Herrhausen's armored Mercedes-Benz 500SE limousine passed by. Antiterrorist expert Neusel escaped that fate only because his chauffeur was on holiday: Neusel was driving and the blast ripped through the passenger side...
...small wooden box containing a detonator was found in a nearby park. The box apparently had been connected by cable to a bomb attached to a bicycle parked on the limousine's route. Police say the bomb included a light-sensitive device that triggered the explosion precisely as Herrhausen's limousine passed by. Under the box was a piece of paper with the all too familiar star-shaped symbol superimposed on a drawing of a Kalashnikov rifle: the trademark of West Germany's ultra-leftist urban terrorists, the Red Army Faction...
Suddenly, three years after its last assassination, the R.A.F. had roared back into life with the murder of West Germany's most influential captain of finance. Herrhausen ran the country's largest bank (assets: $165 billion), maintained close ties with Soviet and East European officials and was an outspoken advocate of German unification. Only last spring the weekly Der Spiegel dubbed him "the Lord of Money...
...with most of its hard-core members dead or serving long prison terms and its extreme left-wing ideology on the wane, the group had chosen to strike. There is still a commando group of about 15 members at large in West Germany. Some security experts doubt that the Herrhausen murder signals a new wave of R.A.F. terror. But, declared Heinrich Boge, head of the Bundeskriminalamt, which coordinates federal criminal investigations, "there was never any indication that they were giving...
Since taking over as Deutsche Bank's sole chief executive in May 1988, Herrhausen had aggressively begun to change the bank, the world's 20th largest, from an insular institution to a global financial power. Only last week he made a $1.4 billion takeover bid for the British merchant bank Morgan Grenfell Group PLC. Throughout his life, Herrhausen viewed himself as a man driven by destiny to lead West Germany to new heights as a world economic power. It was a mission that was brutally shattered on a street in Bad Homburg last Thursday morning...