La Belle Discotheque Bombing

On April 5, 1986, a bomb packed with nails exploded at the La Belle discotheque in the West Berlin, killing two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman and injuring 229 people. The four-pound bomb exploded at 1:40 A.M. on the crowded dance floor; the flying nails caused such grave injuries that dozens of the victims lost their limbs.

U.S. president Ronald Reagan quickly accused Libya of the bombing of La Belle, a popular nightspot for U.S. soldiers stationed in West Berlin. 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 el-Qaddafi's home and killed one of his children.

The case went unsolved for years, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall allowed German investigators to discover 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 Abdulghasem Eter worked with Palestinian Yassir Chraidi, an employee of the Libyan embassy in East Berlin, to carry out the attack. The men recruited Ali Channa, a German man of Lebanese descent, and his wife, German Verena Channa, to carry out the bombing. The Channas were paid about $7,000 for their roles in the attack, according to prosecutors.

Mrs. Channa actually planted the bomb, carrying the explosives into the nightclub in her knapsack. Mrs. Channa'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. Mrs. Channa was imprisoned for 14 years on the charge of murder, while the others were sentenced to between 12 and 14 years of jail for attempted murder.

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, Libya, 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.