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Hardly had the euphoria taken hold, however, when it was muted by the shocking news that four imprisoned West German terrorists, whose freedom had been demanded by the skyjackers, had attempted suicide, three successfully. Andreas Baader, 34, leader of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, who had been in prison since 1972, shot himself through the back of his head with a 7.65-mm. pistol; Jan-Carl Raspe, 33, shot himself with a 9-mm. pistol, just above his right ear; Gudrun Ensslin, 37, Baader's mistress before they were imprisoned, hanged herself with electrical wire. The fourth terrorist, Irmgard Mŏller, 30, stabbed herself in the throat and chest with a bread knife; she was rushed to a hospital and at week's end was no longer in critical condition.
Schmidt paled when told about the suicides, snapping, "But that's impossible." Indeed it should have been. All four were locked in a special, maximum-security wing at Stammheim prison in Stuttgart. Since the Schleyer kidnaping, they had been in solitary confinement, separated from each other and denied visitors (including their lawyers) and access to newspapers, radio and television. Almost daily, guards searched their cells. The suicides thus raised a number of troubling (and embarrassing) questions. How did the prisoners manage to get and hide their weapons? How were they able to learn so quickly of the failure of the skyjacking that might have won their release? How could they coordinate their near simultaneous suicides? The first answers were lame. Dr. Traugott Bender, Minister of Justice of Baden-Wurttemberg, the state in which the prison is located, volunteered that Moller "had that knife at her disposal so that at night, if she got hungry, she could [slice] something to eat." After this incredible explanation. Bender was forced to resign. The director of the prison, Hans Nusser, was summarily fired.
A investigation later disclosed that the maximum-security prison actually had been turned into something of a terrorist base. Two secret holes were found in the cells of Baader and Raspe. One was large enough to hold a pistol that could have been smuggled to the prisoners before they were placed in solitary confinement. The second hole contained elements of an ingeniously simple but highly effective communications system: batteries, wires and sockets. When connected to the cell's thermostat, they formed a primitive telegraph over which the terrorists could signal each other in code. In Raspe's cell, investigators also found a tiny radio; with it, Raspe probably followed the course of the skyjacking and learned of the rescue at Mogadishu.
Predictably, some of the terrorists' lawyers—most of whom are radicals —hinted that the prisoners might not have taken their own lives. Attorney Hans Heinz Heldmann blamed the deaths on the government. To counter such charges, Baden-Wurttemberg officials asked doctors from Switzerland, Austria and Belgium to participate in the autopsies. Concluded Zurich University Professor Hans-Peter Hartmann after his examination: "Everything we have found indicates suicide."