$1 million Cleo Smith reward status
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Western Australia Police have said they do not anticipate the state’s landmark $1 million reward for information about Cleo Smith to be paid out.
WA Premier Mark McGowan offered the hefty reward for information leading to Cleo’s location, or to the arrest and conviction of those involved in her disappearance. The reward was announced just six days after Cleo was abducted from her family tent at the remote Blowholes campsite on October 16th.
While police remain tight-lipped about what prompted them to search the locked Carnarvon home where Cleo was found, they did credit the hard work of a 140-strong police taskforce.
WA Police Minister Paul Papalia told ABC on Thursday morning: “It wasn’t a random tip off or clairvoyant or any of those sorts of things you might hear.
“It was just a hard police grind,” he said.
WA Police Deputy Commissioner Col Blanch previously said he doesn’t expect the $1 million reward to be claimed, but he told Channel Seven’s Sunrise on Thursday he’s not completely ruling out the possibility.
“Look, the police collected so much information from day one for those 18 days that they were able to trawl through and put that jigsaw puzzle together,” Comm Blanch said.
“Now part of that jigsaw puzzle was information from the community, but it all contributed to the outcome.
“Look, we’re not going to discount that it’s not going to be paid out, but certainly the information that I have from the police is that really it was good, hard detective and analyst work."
Criteria for police paying reward
Associate Professor of Criminology and forensic anthropologist Dr Xanthé Mallet from the University of Newcastle told Yahoo News Australia there are specific rules around rewards regarding what they will be paid out for.
Cleo’s reward was offered for location information, or details that could lead to an arrest and conviction.
“Each reward has its own structure for what it will be paid out for,” she said.
“If there was a genuine call on this reward I’m sure they’d be very happy to pay it,” she added.
Speaking with the ABC, Dr Mallet said the Carnarvon community and the whole of Australia just really “wanted to see Cleo found alive and unharmed”.
“…at the end of the day Cleo is home, and for most people the reward is seeing her in her parents’ arms in the hospital safe and unharmed.”