Petra Kelly, the founder of Germany's Greens party, was apparently shot to death by her longtime lover, general-turned-pacifist Gert Bastian, who then killed himself, police said Tuesday.
Their decomposed bodies were found Monday night in the suburban house in Bonn that they had shared for years.Hartmut Otto, Bonn's chief of detectives, said Bastian used a .38-caliber revolver to shoot Kelly in the head as she slept and then shot himself in the head. Otto said he knew of no motive for Bastian's actions.
In a statement before Otto's news conference, the Greens party said Kelly and Bastian, both former members of parliament, had been deeply shaken by recent right-wing attacks on foreigners. In an open letter in September, Bastian had decried that "neo-fascism has spread across our land like wildfire."
A Greens spokeswoman said separately that numerous party members had in recent weeks received threatening letters from anonymous right-wing ex-trem-ists. The spokeswoman, Anne Nilges, said she did not know whether Kelly, 44, and Bastian, 69, received similar letters.
Otto said there were no signs of a struggle in the home.
Kelly and Bastian were leading leftists, belonging as Greens members to a movement that thrust the environment and disarmament in-to mainstream politics more than a decade ago. The group's initial vitality and success inspired similar movements in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries.
The Greens formed in 1979 with a largely "counterculture" constituency, but quickly became influential in national politics.
Speaking fluent English, the American-educated Kelly was the face the Greens showed America during the early 1980s, when she led protests against U.S. nuclear missiles stationed in Germany.
More recently, she had distanced herself from the party, which lost most of its seats in Parliament two years ago.
Kelly, Bastian and 22 other Greens were elected to Germany's parliament in 1983.