The alleged leader of the Antifa “Hammer Gang” terrorist group was arrested in Germany on Friday on charges of plotting and carrying out targeted attacks on right-wing activists in Europe.
After years of successfully evading authorities, Johann Guntermann (31), the suspected head of the notorious Leipzig “Hammer Gang”, was caught travelling on a train near Weimar by a German police task force.
Described as Germany’s most dangerous left-wing terrorist, Guntermann was brought before a Federal Court of Justice judge in Karlsruhe on Saturday morning, the Bild newspaper reports.
According to the top German tabloid, the “Antifa East” radical had “HATE” tattooed on his right hand and “COPS” on his left.
Guntermann, who was previously engaged to convicted far-left “Hammer Gang” extremist Lina E., had an arrest warrant against him since March 2021 and later had a bounty of 10,000 euros on his head. It is currently unclear if one of his fellow leftists betrayed him for the money.
The 31-year-old extremist is accused of planning and committing attacks on various right-wing groups in Europe, supposedly including neo-Nazi collectives. As the Antifa group’s name would imply, the attacks were typically carried out with hammers and batons.
Following his arrest, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said that “nobody can feel safe in the underground.”
Investigators from the Saxony State Criminal Police Office have said that they are “fairly certain” that Guntermann was involved in a hammer attack on a group of “neo-Nazis” in Budapest on February 11th of 2023.
Another alleged participant in the attack, Italian schoolteacher and “anti-fascist” activist Ilaria Salis, was released from house arrest in Hungary earlier this year after being elected to the European Parliament in June, which granted her legal immunity.
In October, MEPs from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party formally requested that the European Parliament rescind her immunity so she can face justice after being found guilty of three counts of assault, charges which Salis has denied.
The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, said that the request from Hungary will be deliberated by the Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee.
