WIESBADEN, Germany German police believe a few strands of hair may help them solve some of the country's most notorious terrorist murders stretching back 15 years.

The genetic fingerprinting technique is being hailed as a breakthrough at police headquarters in Wiesbaden, especially since one of the hairs turns out to have belonged to a suspected terrorist.

It was found on a towel opposite the house of Detlev Rohwedder, a key industrialist shot dead at his Dusseldorf study window in 1991.

Rohwedder was in charge of privatizing former state-run industries after the demise of hardline communist East Germany and this killing, like half a dozen unsolved murders since the 1980s, was claimed by the Red Army Faction (RAF).

The extreme left-wing group, successors to the notorious Baader- Meinhof gang run by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, terrorized Germany for two decades before disbanding in 1998.

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office or BKA said the new analysis gives a "decisive impulse" to the probe into Rohwedder's death although the terrorist whose hair it was, Wolfgang Grams, was killed in a spectacular police shootout in 1993.

BKA spokesman Dirk Buechner says the genetic fingerprinting method is scientifically reliable and likely to stand up in a court of law.

Experts previously needed fresh hair for analysis but the new method means hairs stored for years can be subject to DNA probes.

The finding of a hair doesn't prove that terrorist Grams was at the scene of the crime but the high-tech methods used to analysis offers a real ray of hope for investigators.

It's the first step forward in the murder case after over ten years and more than a thousand clues, a morale booster for experts who have so far failed to find the RAF killers of prominent Germans like Deutsche boss Chief Alfred Herrhausen who was blown up in his car by a RAF commando on November 30, 1989.

Herrhausen, 59, was a prototype RAF "enemy". The former pupil of an elite Nazi school went on to head the board of Germany's biggest bank and was a keen advocate of globalization.

The only clues police have to go are reports of a man wearing a jogging suit and last seen near Frankfurt seconds before the manager's car passed a light beam, triggering the huge explosion that killed him.

The identity of those who killed Siemens manager Karl Heinz Beckurts, 56, in a bomb attack on his car in 1986 remain a mystery too and police have drawn a blank on finding the killers the same year of diplomat Gerold von Braunmuehl. The 51-year-old former was a top advisor to Hans-Dietrich Genscher, German foreign minister at the time.

The terrorist who pulled the trigger and a female accomplice fled after the shooting on a Bonn street in a red car. Police still do not know who they were.

Sixteen years after the death of Ernst Zimmermann, top executive at the MTU engine and turbine works, police have not charged anyone with shooting him in the back of the head with two bullets from a revolver. A man and woman had forced their way into his Munich home shortly before shots fell.

Whether the terrorists have really decided to call it a day is a matter for conjecture. The BKA says genetic hair and saliva analysis proves that two former RAF extremists took part in the July 1999 attack on a security van. A recent similar heist where robbers made off with two million marks (around a million dollars) carries their hallmarks too.

Ernst Uhrlau, secret service coordinator at the Chancellory in Berlin, does not believe that the RAF has risen from the grave. He does warn though that the wanted former terrorists still have access to armor-piercing weapons and may be using them to finance their fugitive lives, DPA reported.