"Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski found dead in prison at 81
10 June 2023, 19:03
Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the "Unabomber" who waged a mail bombing campaign over 17 years, has died in federal prison in the US.
The Harvard-educated mathematician, 81, killed three people and injured 23 others as he ran the terror from a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness until he was jailed in 1998.
Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press.
He was pronounced dead at 8am local time (1pm BST) after being found unresponsive in his cell.
A cause of death has not been announced for the mastermind behind 16 bombings between 1978 and 1998.
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Before his transfer to the prison medical facility, he had been held in the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years for a campaign of terror that set universities nationwide on edge.
Kaczynski admitted to committing the attacks which permanently maimed several of his victims.
He forced The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to make the decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society And Its Future, which claimed modern society and technology was leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation.
Kaczynski’s brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognised the treatise’s tone and tipped off the FBI, which had been searching for the Unabomber for years in the nation’s longest, costliest manhunt.
Authorities in April 1996 found him in a 10ft by 14ft plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, which was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.
