Germany paroles "most evil woman".

A German court in Stuttgart ruled on February 12 to release 57-year-old terrorist Brigitte Mohnhaupt on parole, despite the fact that she has shown little indication of renouncing her terrorist past. Mohnhaupt has served 24 years of a life sentence for her role in nine murders as a leader of the notorious left-wing Marxist-terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF).

Mohnhaupt was a leader of the "second generation" RAF that terrorized Germany in the late 1970s. The group, since proven to have been supported by the notorious East German Stasi, has its origins in the Baader-Meinhof Gang founded in the 1960s by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist and member of the German Communist Party whose work on the left-wing paper Konkret in the 1960s was, according to Meinhof's daughter Bettina Rohl, financed and controlled by an East Berlin cell of the Communist Party.

By 1970, the original RAF members had traveled to the Middle East where they began terrorist training in Palestinian guerilla camps. Returning to Germany, the group began a string of terrorist attacks and bank robberies before the core members of the early group were apprehended in 1972.

After the capture of the original RAF members, a new generation of RAF terrorists emerged and conducted a violent campaign of attacks aimed at forcing the German government to release the original cast of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Mohnhaupt's pending release is popular among Germany's leftists, but not among relatives of RAF victims. "These people don't deserve mercy," said Waltrude Schleyer, the 90-year-old widow of Harms-Martin Schleyer, the Dresden Bank head who was murdered by Mohnhaupt and her co-conspirators during a botched kidnapping.