This Europe: Mystery of missing Baader brains

The dead terrorists of the the infamous Red Army Faction (RAF), a 1970s urban guerrilla group, still exert a morbid fascination for some Germans.

The news magazine Der Spiegel has revealed that the brains of three of the group, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, have vanished from the laboratory where they were examined after they killed themselves in jail.

The Red Army Faction waged a campaign of killings, bombings and abductions against the West German establishment in the 1970s and early 1980s. Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in prison in 1976, and three others committed suicide a year later. All four brains were apparently removed without their families' knowledge and dissected in a bizarre study by German authorities to determine whether brain abnormalities might have led to their "radical and antisocial behaviour".

The organs were held at a university hospital in Tübingen but three brains – of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe – have vanished, as Der Spiegel found last week when its reporters, prompted by Bettina Röhl, Meinhof's daughter, made inquiries.

Ms Röhl, a journalist, discovered this month that 26 years after her death her mother's brain was still in a jar in a university laboratory in Magdeburg in eastern Germany

Richard Meyerman, head of the Tübingen Institute for Brain Research, told Der Spiegel that the brains had been missing for at least 12 years. "When I took over the institute in 1990, the brains were not there, although they were still listed in our files," he said. He does not think they have been stolen.

Tests on Meinhof's brain confirmed she had suffered "neurological abnormalities", probably caused by a brain tumour. The unanswered question is: did the damage propel Meinhof to a career as a terrorist? In any case, doctors now say the research casts doubts on her fitness to stand trial.