Duesseldorf, Germany
A convicted German Red Army Faction terrorist, serving two life sentences
for the 1977 kidnapping and death of the nation's top business leader,
is scheduled to be freed, the Duesseldorf state court said Friday.
Stefan Wisniewski was found guilty by the same court in December 1981
of double murder, kidnapping, and membership in a banned terrorist group.
He is being released March 1 to serve the remainder of his sentence on
parole because he has convincingly renounced terrorism, the court said.
Wisniewski, now 55, was among four radical leftist terrorists who kidnapped
Hans Martin Schleyer, president of the Industrial Employers' of Germany,
in a shootout on a Cologne street that killed four bodyguards. He was arrested
in May 1978 in Paris and extradited to Germany.
The kidnapping Sept. 5, 1977, was an attempt to force the release of
11 other imprisoned Red Army Faction members, including their leader, Andreas
Baader. When the attempt failed, Schleyer was killed. His body was found
on Oct. 19, 1977, in the trunk of a car in Muelhausen, France. The Red
Army Faction grew out of the student uprisings in the late 1960s, and it
carried out a long string of killings and attacks on NATO and industrial
targets in Germany for more than two decades. The group announced in 1992
that its was abandoning violence as a means of forcing political change,
and several members serving long prison terms have been released on parole
since then.