On 5 April 1986, three people were killed and 229 injured when La Belle discothèque was bombed in the Friedenau district of West Berlin. The entertainment venue was commonly frequented by United States soldiers, and two of the dead and 79 of the injured were Americans. Libya was accused by the US government of sponsoring the bombing, and US President Ronald Reagan ordered retaliatory strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya ten days later. The operation was widely seen as an attempt to kill Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. However, in the bombing's aftermath, this claim was met with widespread skepticism. In 1987, Manfred Ganschow, the head of the West German team investigating the bombing, said that there was no evidence pointing the finger at Libya, a belief which was corroborated by numerous intelligence agencies in Europe at the time, according to a BBC report. In 2001, following a four-year German trial called murky, and marred by what the court called a "limited willingness" by the American and German governments to share evidence, a court found that the bombing had been "planned by the Libyan Intelligence Service and the Libyan embassy", but absolved Gaddafi of responsibility. Background The bombing came at a time of heightened tension between the United States and Libya, which first escalated in the early 1980s. These tensions drastically escalated in early 1986, when US forces repeatedly flew planes over the Gulf of Sidra. Libyan forces subsequently fired upon American planes, which led to an American bombing campaign. Two weeks before the bombing, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi called for Arab assaults on American interests worldwide after said bombing, in which 35 seamen on a Libyan patrol boat in the western Gulf of Sidra were killed in international waters claimed by the Libyan government. The site of the bombing, a discothèque known as La Belle, was known to be a popular spot for American troops in West Germany. Attack A bomb placed under a table near the disc jockey's booth exploded at 01:45 CET. An eyewitness testified that he had walked outside of the club prior to the bomb going off and the blast knocking him back. He righted himself and went inside to find his wife and joined many individuals who were attempting to help those near the blast. The blast destroyed a large portion of the floor, causing many to fall into the cellar underneath the dance floor.