Germany Charges 5 in ’86 Berlin Discotheque Bombing

BERLIN —  Almost 11 years after two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman were killed in a terrorist bombing of a discotheque popular with Americans here, German prosecutors said Friday that they have charged five suspects and will put them on trial this summer.

The extent of Libya’s role in the bombing will also be under scrutiny, said Dieter Neumann, Berlin’s top prosecutor, explaining that he hopes to prove a case of state-sponsored terrorism.

But Neumann added he has no evidence that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi ordered the bombing.

The attack on La Belle disco, once a haunt of U.S. military personnel, was immediately blamed on Libya by the Reagan administration, which ordered retaliatory airstrikes on the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and the port city of Benghazi.

That counterattack killed a reported 37 Libyans, including Kadafi’s adopted daughter, and injured more than 100. Administration officials said at the time that they had evidence Kadafi himself was responsible for the Berlin bombing.

At a news conference Friday, Neumann named as organizers of the bombing Yasser “Yousef” Chraidi, 38, a stateless Palestinian, and Musbah Eter, 39, a Libyan. Chraidi worked at the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin at the time of the bombing; Eter worked for Libya’s secret service, Neumann said.

Of the five accused, only Eter has confessed, Neumann said, adding that his testimony helped to implicate the other four. Other crucial evidence in the case came from files kept by the East German secret police and from decoded radio telexes sent from Libya to its embassy in East Berlin.

Neumann declined to comment on why his office was given the decoded telexes only in 1996, when German and U.S. intelligence agencies had known about them for almost 11 years.

Neumann said that Eter is now living at an undisclosed address in Germany and that the other accused are in police custody. Besides Eter and Chraidi, the remaining three suspects are German nationals: Ali Chanaa, 37, a former free-lance agent of the East German secret police; Verena Chanaa, 37, his former wife; and Andrea Haeussler, 31, Verena Chanaa’s sister.

According to the 87-page indictment, the two alleged ringleaders brought plastic explosives to West Berlin from the East in March 1986, in response to an order from Libya to its embassy in East Berlin, to “commit as soon as possible an act of terrorism against a U.S. institution.”

Tensions between Tripoli and Washington were running high because of fatal attacks by Libya-linked terrorists on airports in Rome and Vienna. The United States had reacted to the incidents with naval maneuvers off the Libyan coast, sinking two Libyan warships.

Eter and Chraidi allegedly drew up a list of targets, including a theater in the heart of West Berlin’s U.S. military residential area, a nearby McDonald’s restaurant and three discos. Neumann said investigators found this list in the East German secret police files.

The two Libyans then smuggled the explosives over the East-West Berlin border, Neumann said, taking advantage of their diplomatic status to cross without being searched. They allegedly delivered the explosives to Ali Chanaa to plant.

The two sisters ended up planting the bomb instead, Neumann said: 6 1/2 pounds of plastic explosives, packed with shrapnel for maximum injuries, positioned close to the dance floor at La Belle.

“The Libyan order said that there should be as many victims as possible,” Neumann said.

The two women then reportedly left the disco five minutes before the bomb went off at 1:30 a.m. April 5. Besides the three dead, about 230 off-duty U.S. military personnel were injured.

A few hours later, Neumann said, U.S. intelligence picked up and decoded a message from the Libyan Embassy that said: “At 1:30, one of the planned actions took place, without leaving a trace.”

Christian Retzlaff of The Times’ Berlin Bureau contributed to this report.