In retaliation for the April 5 bombing in West Berlin in which two U.S. servicemen were killed, U.S. president Ronald Reagan orders major bombing raids against Libya, killing 60 people.
On 5 April 1986, three people were killed and 229 injured when La Belle discothque 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.:81 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.
April 5 is the 95th day of the year (96th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 270 days remain until the end of the year.