STUTTGART – A woman accused of a car-bomb attack in Hungary on a bus carrying Soviet Jews in 1991 is to go on trial in Germany in April, accused of 33 counts of attempted murder and an explosives offence.

Andrea Klump, 46, is currently serving a nine-year sentence in Germany for attempting to set off a bomb at a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) base in Rota, Spain in June 1988.

In the Hungary attack, 25 kilograms of high explosive was hidden in a parked car on the road to Budapest Airport to be detonated using a homemade radio device. The indictment says the remote control may have been faulty, and the bomb went off a few seconds early.

Two Hungarians in a police car travelling ahead of the bus were injured. Four persons were hurt aboard the bus, which was carrying two escorts and 29 Jewish emigrants bound for Israel or the West.

Klump is accused of being one of several persons, one of them named as Horst Ludwig Meyer, assigned to the attack, carried out on behalf of a radical Palestinian group.

The state superior court in Stuttgart said Monday the trial would begin 22 April and was expected to last till September. German law allows German nationals to be charged for acts committed on foreign soil.

Klump admitted to the Rota bombing, also on behalf of Palestinians. Before the May 2001 verdict, prosecutors dropped an additional charge of membership in the RAF, a German urban guerrilla group that terrorized Germany three decades ago and has since folded.

Austrian police captured Klump in September 1999 in Vienna. Meyer was killed in the shootout.

DPA
Subject: German news