Greens Founder, Partner Found Dead

BONN —  Greens Party founder Petra Kelly and her companion were discovered dead in their Bonn home in a case of murder, suicide or both, the investigating prosecutor said today.

Neighbors alerted police after finding the bodies, with wounds indicating violent death, in the house where Kelly lived with Gert Bastian, a former West German army major general, police spokesman Markus Toelle said.

Prosecutor Wolfgang Komp told reporters outside the tidy house in Tannenbusch, a northern suburb, that the bodies had been there for “a long time,” complicating identification.

“It could be a joint suicide, a murder with suicide or murder,” Komp said. “All possibilities (are) open.” He declined to say whether a weapon or suicide note had been found.

Kelly, 44, a tireless fighter against pollution and the nuclear arms race, helped found the ecological Greens Party and was long its best-known face.

Kelly’s impassioned oratory at the head of mass demonstrations made her an influential voice in German and European politics.

She became one of the first Greens members of Parliament in 1983, but she faded from the political scene as the Greens’ popularity declined in the wake of German unification in 1990.

Bastian, 69, who fought in a World War II tank division, became a leading figure of the West German peace movement after being forcibly retired from the army in 1980 for opposing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s deployment of U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe.