Word: ponto
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...impunity with which the terrorists have struck over the past five months has hit West Germany's business community hard. Several businessmen last week recalled an odd incident. After the head of Germany's Dresdener Bank, Jurgen Ponto, was murdered in July, some of his friends gathered for a memorial service in Sensbachtal, where Ponto had kept a hunting lodge. Looking around the room, which contained some of the biggest names in German industry and politics, one man remarked, "The next victim of terrorism is almost certainly standing in this room now." The speaker was Hanns-Martin Schleyer...
...round in what many West Germans have begun calling a civil war between their government and a small army of nihilistic urban terrorists bent on disrupting public order. Since April, Chief Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback has been gunned down on the streets of Karlsruhe and Banker Jürgen Ponto slain inside his estate near Frankfurt (TIME, Aug. 15). A report by the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal Criminal Office) estimates that some 1,200 persons in West Germany could become active and dangerous at any time," and an additional 6,000 might give the terrorists "more than verbal support " No wonder that...
...letter that was anonymously left at a police station. It was signed Kommando Siegfried Hausner, R.A.F.-referring to a terrorist who lied after a 1975 attack on the West German embassy in Stockholm. The initials stand for the now familiar Red Army Faction, which had killed both Buback and Ponto. The kidnapers' message warned that Schleyer would be killed unless eleven terrorists were released from German prisons, each given 100,000 deutsche marks (about $43,000), and flown out of the country. Among the eleven: Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin, the top members of the notorious...
...days later a mysterious caller informed the Frankfurt office of Reuters news agency that Ponto had been murdered by a radical group known as Roter Morgen (Red Morning). The caller threatened more executions unless "political prisoners" held by the "exploiting class" were freed. Police scarcely needed to be told that radicals were responsible. So many killings have been carried out by terrorist organizations spawned from West Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang -17 since 1969-that the file on these radicals has been computerized...
From mug shots Ponto's widow and chauffeur identified the second woman a Eleonore Maria Poensgen, 23, another radical from an upstanding family. Police arrested her, but witnesses placed he elsewhere at the time of the shooting. Investigators thereupon turned their search toward a look-alike 22-year-old nurse named Adelheid Schulz who, like Poensgen, had a dossier in the computer...