By Rob Broomby BBC Berlin correspondent

The daughter of the German left-wing extremist, Ulrike Meinhof, one of the founders of the violent Red Army Faction, has claimed that her mother's brain was removed from her body for scientific investigation without the family's permission.

Meinhof's daughter claims her mother may have had mental abnormalities

The Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, carried out a campaign of killings and bombings against leading industrial figures beginning in the 1970s.

Now prosecutors are checking the claims.

Meinhof, who committed suicide in 1976 along with two other Red Army Faction leaders, was post-war Germany's most notorious urban guerrilla, but no-one has satisfactorily explained what turned a highly intelligent campaigning journalist into a killer pledged to overthrow the state.

Now her daughter, Bettina Roehl, has claimed the tests after her prison suicide in 1976 showed brain abnormalities which may have made her unfit to stand trial.

Investigation

More than 25 years on, she wants the university clinic holding the organ to release it for burial.

She claims Meinhof's brain was preserved in a jar and is kept in a cardboard box at Magdeburg University.

She said the latest investigation in 1997 had confirmed that neurological abnormalities followed a brain tumour treatment were visible in parts of the brain dealing with the emotions.

State prosecutors investigating the case say that if she never gave permission for her body to be used for scientific purposes, then the brain should have been destroyed after the autopsy.

The ethics committee of the university which conducted the latest tests will discuss the case on Tuesday.

Mentally damaged?

Ms Roehl is herself no stranger to controversy.

She has launched a campaign against many of her mother's generation.

It was her photographs of today's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, on a violent 1970s demonstration which nearly ended his career.

News that the intellectual force behind the Red Army Faction may have been mentally damaged would have undermined the group's self-justification much sooner.

Ms Roehl says it is astonishing that the findings were suppressed.