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Saturday, September 22, 2001
By Cindi Lash, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
After a federal court in Manhattan indicted fugitive Saudi millionaire and terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in 1998, the U.S. State Department announced a reward of up to $5 million for his arrest and conviction.
To spread the word of that reward around the world, the department printed and circulated thousands of cardboard matchbooks bearing bin Laden's image, along with instructions for collecting the reward printed in several languages.
Nearly three years later, bin Laden's suspected involvement with the terrorists who hijacked and crashed four U.S. airliners has put those matchbooks back into circulation. They first surfaced last week at the crash site of United Flight 93 in Stonycreek, Somerset County, where law enforcement agents circulated them.
Those matchbooks were left over from batches produced after bin Laden and 16 associates were indicted on charges of plotting twin truck-bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998.
But a spokesman for the State Department bureau that produces the matchbooks said it is now considering making more matchbooks and circulating them more widely in an effort to bring bin Laden to justice. New books may be printed with updated information about bin Laden if charges are eventually filed against him in the Sept. 11 attacks, department spokesman Andy Laine said.
The matchbooks are a product of the State Department's Rewards for Justice program, created in the mid-1980s by the department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Laine said. The program offers up to $5 million for information that enables U.S. law enforcement agents to prevent or successfully prosecute terrorist attacks.
The program started using matchbooks in the early 1990s to publicize rewards offered for World Trade Center bombing suspect Ramzi Yousef and for Mir Aimal Kansi, who shot and killed two CIA employees outside the agency's headquarters in 1993.
Matchbooks in various languages have been circulated around the world through embassies and diplomatic posts as well as in other ways that Laine declined to describe.
"It's absolutely an effective program. It sounds horrible, but in many of the places where we circulate matchbooks, everybody still smokes," he said. "The books are something that people pull out in public and share with others. Every time you pull [a matchbook] out of your pocket, you're staring at the face of a terrorist."
Matchbooks produced after bin Laden's indictment in 1998 were printed in English, Arabic, French, Urdu and Pakistani dialects and were circulated in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe, Laine said. They cost about 7 cents each to produce.
Laine said the Rewards of Justice program has paid out more than $6 million in rewards for information that helped investigators over the past five years, but said he could not say if any of those tips came from matchbook users. The matchbooks also advise that those who collect rewards may be entitled to protection of their identity and possible relocation for themselves and their family.
The State Department advises tipsters to pass along information about bin Laden or other suspected terrorists by telephoning (800) 437-6371; by mailing information to Reward for Justice, P.O. Box 96781, Washington, D.C., 20090-6781; by contacting any U.S. embassy or consulate; or sending e-mail to mail@dssrewards.net.
The bin Laden matchbooks, however, list an incorrect web address. The State Department may ask that Web site to provide a link to the correct Web address of www.dssrewards.net.