Disco Bombing Case Goes Awry

BERLIN —  Conspiracy theorists who have tired of the Kennedy assassination or Princess Diana’s fatal car crash may wish to turn their attention to a trial now unfolding in Berlin.

In a stately courtroom here, a judge must decide who was to blame for the 1986 bombing of La Belle disco, a favorite of U.S. soldiers stationed in West Berlin. Two GIs and a Turkish woman died in the bombing, and more than 200 other people were injured.

The Reagan administration blamed Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi and sent U.S. jets to bomb Tripoli and Benghazi on April 14, 1986, nine days after the disco attack.

Now, however, the man who was supposed to supply comprehensive answers to lingering questions about the case, the prosecution’s star witness, has turned things upside down.

Over the last two weeks, Musbah Eter, a Libyan and one of five defendants, has been testifying in the joint trial. According to him, Libya did not organize the disco bombing at all. The CIA did.

Say that again? American intelligence bombing a club jammed with American citizens? Even the court interpreters were struggling to suppress their laughter as they translated Eter’s words from Arabic into German.

Eter claimed that, while it was true that his co-defendants had been planning to plant a bomb, the Soviet Union had ordered them to stop. The group planted a harmless dummy bomb instead, he said, to prove their trustworthiness. And then, he said, a Libyan exile acting on CIA orders appeared out of nowhere and switched the dummy with 6 pounds of real plastic explosive.

“Libya had nothing to do with this,” Eter, who sat hunched behind bulletproof glass, maintained, yelling his testimony.

The 40-year-old former diplomat, stationed in 1986 at the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin, was not supposed to have said this. Last year, he gave an exhaustive pretrial statement that much more closely matches American assumptions about the disco disaster: He said the bombing had been ordered by senior Libyan officials and organized by his colleagues at the Libyan Embassy.

Now, each time Judge Peter Marhofer reminds Eter that he is contradicting his previous statement, the defendant retorts with phrases such as “Allah is all-knowing.”

It is not the first time Eter has exercised a talent for extreme and unpredictable behavior.

Immediately after delivering his original statement blaming everything on Libya, Eter got on an airplane and flew straight to . . . Libya, where no one seemed at all interested in arresting him or otherwise punishing him for implicating his fellow countrymen in an act of international terrorism.

Then Eter--who, although under surveillance by the Germans, was free to come and go--flew to Berlin to await trial but soon ran off again. The authorities picked him up in Rome, at a hotel across from the Libyan Embassy, where he was found with a suitcase full of cash.

Presumably the cash came from Libyan officials, but why they would continue to cultivate and underwrite a man who had recently given such damaging testimony is anybody’s guess.

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“If I were writing a novel about this, I wouldn’t know how to end it,” said defense lawyer Hans-Christian Stroebele, who is representing another of the accused.

The defense and prosecution agree that the best hope for learning the truth still lies in the files of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi.

In the files are recorded, among other things, the comings and goings of Eter, who sometimes turns up wearing his Libyan diplomat’s hat--but on other occasions is paying unexplained visits to the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin.

Europeans have always wondered how Washington was so clear-minded so soon after the blast about the identity of the bombers’ patrons.

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