2 Suspects Held in ’86 Berlin Disco Blast

The Berlin Justice Ministry said Friday that it has arrested two people in connection with the 1986 bombing of a West Berlin nightclub, lending new momentum to a high-profile case that appeared to have fizzled until this year.

The German authorities also said they had issued arrest warrants for four other people believed to be linked to the explosion, one a member of the Libyan secret service and the others former staffers of the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin.

All were reported to be somewhere in Libya.

There have been arrests before in this case--one of the worst terrorist attacks ever targeting Americans in Germany--but there has never been enough evidence for a conviction.

Two American servicemen and a Turkish woman died when the bomb exploded just off the dance floor at La Belle discotheque in April 1986. About 230 other people, many of them off-duty U.S. soldiers, were injured at the club, which was popular with American military personnel.

Then-President Ronald Reagan held Libyan leader Col. Moammar Kadafi personally responsible for the disco attack and ordered airstrikes against the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and the port city of Benghazi in retaliation. At least 15 people died in those counterattacks, including Kaddafi’s 15-month-old adopted daughter.

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On Friday, Berlin Justice spokeswoman Corinna Bischoff said police had arrested a 37-year-old woman, identified only as Verena C., and her former husband, a man of the same age identified as Ali C. The two suspects’ nationalities were not revealed.

Bischoff said Verena C. is suspected of planting the bomb at the instigation of her former husband and another suspect, Mohammed Yasser Chraidi, a stateless Palestinian who until recently was living in Sidon, Lebanon.

Germany has long believed that Chraidi, a former employee of the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin, was the bombing mastermind.

West Berlin police were monitoring his activities at the time of the incident--he was considered suspicious because of an unrelated slaying in West Berlin in 1984--and observed him just a week before the disco attack crossing from East Berlin to the West on what apparently was a scouting trip.

German authorities issued a warrant for Chraidi’s arrest in 1993 but were able to obtain his extradition from Lebanon only last May after a three-year diplomatic tug of war. Lebanese authorities had detained Chraidi in connection with other alleged crimes.

Bischoff declined to say whether it was Chraidi who provided information leading to Friday’s new arrests and warrants.

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Dieter Neumann, a Berlin prosecutor, would say only that the newest evidence did not come from files of the former East German secret police, known as the Stasi.

Those files are still being reviewed and archived in the wake of the collapse of the East German state.

But the Stasi files are reported to have provided some of the evidence pointing to Chraidi. German investigators say it appears the Stasi closely monitored the preparations for the La Belle bombing but did not order the attack.

Shortly after the bombing, Reagan administration officials said the United States had intercepted cables between the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin and Tripoli showing clearly that Libya had organized the attack.

One cable, said to have been sent the day before the bombing, stated that a terrorist attack was imminent, and another, sent the day of the blast, said that an attack had been successful.

Libya has always denied any involvement in the bombing.