Peter-Juergen Boock, born in 1951, belonged to the second generation of the Red Army Faction, the West German group whose members the courts convicted of a series of killings in the 1970s. On May 7, 1984 the Oberlandesgericht (Higher Regional Court) in Stuttgart convicted him of participation in the murders of Juergen Ponto and Hanns Martin Schleyer, both killed in 1977, and imposed three life sentences and a further 15 years. A partial revision on November 28, 1986 reduced the sentence to a single life sentence, which German law required once multiple life terms were no longer allowed. He was released from custody on March 13, 1998, after about 17 years.
Boock was not a defendant in the trials that sent the group's best-known members away. He was arrested only in 1981, after he had broken with the group, and his own later statements about the group's history have been argued over for decades. In the trial that began in 2010 a Stuttgart court heard him as a witness in the trial of another former member over the 1977 killing of Siegfried Buback, a case in which he was not charged and for which, by his own account, he was not present.
Boock was born in 1951. He joined the Red Army Faction in 1976 and became part of its second generation, the members who carried on after the leading figures were arrested in 1972.
In May 1978 he was among four members arrested in Zagreb, then in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia did not hand them to the Federal Republic: the four were flown to South Yemen in November 1978. In spring 1980 Boock broke with the group and went underground in Hamburg. A later account of his case notes that this break was counted in his favor in court.
The two cases for which Boock was convicted both date from 1977. On July 30, 1977 Juergen Ponto was killed in Oberursel, in the Taunus district near Frankfurt.
On September 5, 1977 Hanns Martin Schleyer was abducted in Cologne. Four men died with him that day: Heinz Marcisz, Reinhold Braendle, Helmut Ulmer and Roland Pieler. Schleyer himself was killed in October 1977. The federal prosecutor's office listed Boock as one of four members of the group's commando in the Schleyer case.
The 1984 verdict found him guilty of participation in the murders of Schleyer and Ponto; how the court treated each of the four deaths of September 5 is not on record.
Boock was arrested in Hamburg on January 22, 1981. The trial against him took place before the Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart. On May 7, 1984 the court convicted him of participation in the murders of Hanns Martin Schleyer and Juergen Ponto and sentenced him to three life sentences and 15 years. He was also convicted of membership of a terrorist organization.
On November 28, 1986 a partial revision of the verdict reduced the total to one life sentence. The same year, as a matter of law, a person could be given only one life sentence, and earlier multiple life terms were merged. In September 1988 a pardon application from Boock was with the Federal President, who had given no decision; the Federal Presidential Office said none was imminent and that a pardon in a state under the rule of law is not an absolution.
In 1992 Boock gave a detailed statement to a chief prosecutor in Stuttgart, which has been described as his "life confession". In it he described himself as one of the perpetrators in the Schleyer case. A 1995 review of the Schleyer case said that the federal prosecutor's findings about the commando rested partly on this statement and partly on statements by former members who had left the group for East Germany. The same review noted that for nearly 15 years of imprisonment he had refused to name former comrades, and that after 1990, when the former members' accounts became available, that position could no longer be held.
In a further proceeding the Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart convicted Boock over a 1979 bank robbery in Zurich, Switzerland, in which a passerby died. The court found him guilty of robbery resulting in death and of attempted murder of four police officers. It did not convict him of the murder of the woman who died, because it could not be established who caused her death. The court set an overall sentence covering this case and the earlier convictions. The chronology records that on November 3, 1992 the court reduced the sentences of Boock and Christian Klar to a life sentence each.
Boock was released from custody on March 13, 1998. He had been in custody since January 1981.
After his release Boock continued to speak publicly about the group. In April 2007 he told the press that Christian Klar was not the person responsible in the 1977 killing of Siegfried Buback. The Federal Prosecutor's office opened a new investigation on April 25, 2007 on the basis of statements by Boock and by another former member. In September 2007 he made further statements about the group's history in a two-part television documentary.
That former member was charged in April 2010 and tried in Stuttgart, and Boock testified at the trial. The court's findings relied largely on his testimony. The defense showed him to have made false and contradictory statements, and the presiding judge allowed for errors of perception and memory but did not find his credibility fundamentally undermined.
In 1977 the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that a person given a life sentence must keep a realistic chance of regaining freedom. Release on parole must be possible after at least 15 years, and a court can lengthen that period if it finds a particular gravity of guilt. Pardons are for the Federal President or, in some cases, the states, and cannot be challenged in court. Since 1986, multiple life sentences have been merged into a single one, which is why Boock's three life sentences became one.
Boock's accounts of the group have drawn criticism since the 1980s. A former head of the federal criminal police called his statements unreliable, and the defense in the 2010 trial presented him as a witness who had changed his account. His statements about the Buback killing were not made on personal knowledge: he was not present, and told the press he had the information from others. The 2007 investigation that followed his statements rested partly on them.
The form of his participation in each of the 1977 deaths, as the court defined it, has not been established beyond the verdict's general wording.
1976: Joins the Red Army Faction.
July 30, 1977: Juergen Ponto killed in Oberursel.
September 5, 1977: Hanns Martin Schleyer abducted in Cologne; four men killed.
October 1977: Schleyer killed.
May 11, 1978: Boock arrested in Zagreb with three other members.
November 17, 1978: The four are flown to South Yemen.
Spring 1980: Boock leaves the group and goes underground in Hamburg.
January 22, 1981: Arrested in Hamburg.
May 7, 1984: OLG Stuttgart convicts him of participation in the murders of Schleyer and Ponto; three life sentences and 15 years.
November 28, 1986: Partial revision reduces the sentence to one life sentence.
September 1988: Pardon application with the Federal President; no decision.
1992: Statement to a Stuttgart prosecutor; further Stuttgart sentencing on November 3.
March 13, 1998: Released from custody.
April 25, 2007: New federal investigation opened on the basis of statements by Boock and another former member.
April 2010: The other former member is charged; Boock later testifies in Stuttgart.