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10/20 1144  GERMAN GREENS PARTY CO-FOUNDER PETRA KELLY FOUND DEAD
 
BONN (OCT. 20) DPA - Petra Kelly, a founding member of the German Greens party,
was shot by her pacifist-politician companion who then turned the gun on
himself, police said on Tuesday. 
Kelly, 44, and former Major General Gert Bastian, 69, apparently had been
dead for days when they were found late Monday at the couple's shared home in
Bonn. 
Kelly was found dead in the bedroom, shot in the head from close range.
Bastian lay outside the bedroom door with a similar gunshot wound in the temple,
police spokesman Hartmut Otto said. 
He said there was no sign of a struggle and no suicide note. Otto said the
deaths could have been a suicide pact. Bastian might have shot Kelly while she
was asleep then killed himself, he said. 
Kelly was one of the best-known leaders of the Greens party in the early
1980s. Both she and Bastian had been members of the West German Bundestag
1983-87.
Otto said initial medical examinations had shown no indication of a serious
illness for the couple, although Kelly had reportedly been in poor health for
years. 
Leading parliamentarians expressed schock at the deaths. Parliament speaker
Rita Suessmuth praised the couple as committed politicians who campaigned for a
world free of the fear of war and misery. 
Kelly co-founded the Greens Party in 1979, and quickly became one of the
party's most eloquent spokespersons. She had studied in the United States, and
her fluent English enabled her to spread the Greens Party platform abroad. 
The party won seats in the Bundestag in 1983 for the first time, but lost its
Bundestag representation in 1990, ironically after Kelly had been ousted from
the spokesperson panel. 
Bastian, with whom she had had a longterm friendship, was a former major
general in the Bundeswehr who made headlines in 1980 by coming out publicly
against deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles on West German soil and
asking for early dismissal. 
He was elected to the Bundestag in 1983 along with Kelly and represented the
Greens in the parliamentary Defence Committee. 
Kelly and Bastian were forced to leave the Bundestag in 1987 under a Greens
Party rotation rule requiring its MPs to relinquish their seats to new MPs.
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