Hans-Christian Stroebele, a German lawyer who defended members of the far-left Red Army Faction and later became the Green party's first directly elected constituency lawmaker, has died. He was 83.
German news agency dpa quoted his attorney, Johannes Eisenberg, saying Wednesday that Stroebele died on August 29 after a long illness.
Stroebele, the son of a jurist and a chemist, first rose to prominence in 1970 as one of three lawyers acting for members of the RAF militant group -- also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang — that carried out numerous politically motivated attacks whose targets included US troops in Germany. Fellow lawyer Horst Mahler later swung to the far right, while another, Otto Schily, became Germany's top security official.
Stroebele helped found the Berlin section of the Greens, a party that would stir up German politics from the 1980s onward.
While the Greens have since moved firmly into the center-ground, joining a coalition government under Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder from 1998 to 2005 and current Chancellor Olaf Scholz's three-way alliance, Stroebele remained a gadfly on the left-wing of the party.