Rewards for Justice and the Gauci brothers

[An Agence France Presse news agency report on the ABS-CBN News website on 4 April contains the following sentences:]

Since its launch in 1984, the Rewards for Justice program run by the Diplomatic Security bureau of the State Department has paid out $125 million in rewards to 80 people for information leading to the capture of terrorists. (...)

The program is also still seeking information on cases in which the trail appears to have gone cold, including the 1983 attack on a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut and the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

[The report does not mention the payments made to the Gauci brothers in the Lockerbie case, nor does the Rewards for Justice website.  This blog’s posts on the issue can be accessed here.]

Addendum

[I am grateful to Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer for supplying the link to a page about the Lockerbie case on the Rewards for Justice website.  It reads as follows:]

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, a US registered Boeing 747 en route from London, Heathrow Airport, to JFK Airport in New York, was destroyed when an improvised explosive device, concealed in an item of luggage, detonated in the cargo hold of the aircraft. This explosion resulted in the deaths of all 259 passengers and crew aboard, including 189 Americans, as well as 11 residents of the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

On November 13, 1991, agents of the Libyan government, Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalfia Fhimah, "together with others unknown to the Grand Jury", were indicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for Conspiracy to Destroy a Civil Aircraft of the United States, Kill Nationals of the United States, and on related substantive explosives charges. The following day, the Lord Advocate announced that al-Megrahi and Fhimah had been charged in Scotland with conspiracy and murder offenses.

On January 31, 2001, al-Megrahi was found guilty of the murder of all 270 victims on Pan Am Flight 103, in the air and on the ground in Lockerbie, by a panel of three High Court judges. He received the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment and was required to serve 27 years before becoming eligible to apply for parole. His co-accused, Fhimah was found not guilty and was flown to Tripoli, Libya. On March 14, 2002, al-Megrahi's conviction was affirmed by a panel of five different Scottish High Court judges, and he was moved to Scotland to begin service of his sentence.

Following an application to the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC), in June 2007, al-Megrahi was permitted to file a new appeal. While that appeal was pending, in September, 2008 al-Megrahi was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. On August 20, 2009, based upon the advice of the Scottish Prison Medical Service that he had less than three months to live, and after al-Megrahi withdrew his appeal before the Court could rule, al-Megrahi's application for compassionate release was granted by the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Justice. Including credit for time served in pre-trial detention, al-Megrahi had served slightly more than 10 years of his life sentence when he was released. As of this date, both al-Megrahi and Fhimah are believed to still be in Tripoli.

Believing that al-Megrahi and Fhimah did not act alone in causing a bomb to be loaded onto Pan Am Flight 103, the US Department of State has authorized a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of those responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and the murders of the 270 victims.

[Note that absolutely no mention is made here of the large sums already paid to the Gauci brothers, payments confirmed by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission during its investigation of the Megrahi conviction.]