1986 West Berlin discotheque bombing

1986 West Berlin discotheque bombing, attack carried out on April 5, 1986, in West Berlin, in which Libyan agents detonated a bomb at the La Belle discotheque, a nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany during the Cold War. The bomb, packed with plastic explosives and shrapnel, killed two American soldiers and a Turkish woman and injured 229 others, some of whom lost limbs and were permanently disabled.

U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan quickly accused Libya of the bombing of La Belle. Citing intercepted communications between the Libyan embassy in East Berlin and Tripoli, Libya, Reagan ordered U.S. air raids on Libya. One of the U.S. bombs, dropped 10 days after the La Belle attack, hit Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s home, killing one of his children.

The case of the La Belle discotheque went unsolved for years. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, German investigators discovered a wealth of evidence in former East Germany. Files seized from the headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, led to the arrest of five suspects in 1996. More than 15 years after the bombing, a German court convicted a former Libyan diplomat and three accomplices on murder charges in the La Belle bombing.

During the four-year trial, prosecutors showed that the diplomat, Musbah Eter, worked with Yasser Chraidi, a Palestinian employee of the Libyan embassy in East Berlin, to carry out the attack. The men recruited Ali Chanaa, a German man of Lebanese descent, and his German wife, Verena Chanaa, to carry out the bombing.

Verena Chanaa planted the bomb, carrying the explosives into the nightclub in a travel bag. Chanaa’s sister went with her to the nightclub and left with her five minutes before the blast but claimed to have known nothing of the plot. Chanaa was imprisoned for 14 years on the charge of murder, while the others were sentenced to between 12 and 14 years in jail for attempted murder or aiding and abetting attempted murder. Verena Chanaa’s sister was acquitted for lack of proof that she knew a bomb was in the travel bag.

The German court also ruled that Libya was involved in the La Belle bombing but that no evidence proved the direct involvement of Qaddafi. Prosecutors had charged that Qaddafi called for a terrorist attack against the United States in retaliation for the March 1986 sinking of two Libyan ships in the Gulf of Sidra, presenting radio messages between Tripoli and the East Berlin Libyan embassy. “Expect the result tomorrow morning. It is God’s will,” read a message sent on the night of the attack. Hours after the bombing, another cable reported, “at 1:30 a.m., one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace.” These messages were originally intercepted by the U.S. National Security Agency, which ran an eavesdropping station in West Berlin to monitor East Berlin diplomatic communication. In August 2008 Libya, which since 2003 had been attempting to improve its international relations, agreed to pay $283 million to the victims of the La Belle bombing.