'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski, who evaded capture for 20 years after a mass bombing campaign, was on Saturday found dead in a United States prison cell.
Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski, a mathematician with a Harvard education who withdrew to a run-down cabin in the Montana woods and launched a 17-year bombing campaign that left three people dead and 23 injured, passed away on Saturday. He was 81.
FBI-designated "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski passed away at the federal prison medical facility in Butner, North Carolina, according to Kristie Breshears, a federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson, told The Associated Press. He was discovered unconscious in his cell early on Saturday and was pronounced dead at 8 a.m., according to her. The cause of death wasn't known right away.
The ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski found dead in his jail cell at 81 years old pic.twitter.com/p0gkXyP4zg
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Ted Kaczyunski had been detained at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado since May 1998, when he was given four life sentences plus 30 years for a terror campaign that caused universities all over the country to be on edge.
Before being transferred to the prison medical centre. He admits carrying out 16 explosions between 1978 and 1995, leaving several of his victims permanently disabled.
The deadly homemade explosives created by the Unabomber altered how Americans boarded aeroplanes and sent packages years before the September 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing. In fact, in July 1995, aviation travel on the West Coast was all but shut down.
He compelled The Washington Post and The New York Times to make the agonising decision to print his 35,000-word manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," in September 1995. In it, he stated that contemporary culture and technology were causing people to feel helpless and alienated.
But it ultimately brought him down. David Kaczynski and Linda Patrik, David's wife, noticed the tone of the treatise and alerted the FBI, which had been looking for the Unabomber for years in the nation's longest, priciest manhunt.
Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, was found dead in his prison cell Saturday morning, according to a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson. He was 81.
Kaczynski was previously in a maximum security facility in Colorado but was moved to a medical facility in North Carolina… pic.twitter.com/yEg4PkYuh4
In April 1996, authorities discovered him in a cabin made of plywood and tarpaper that measured 10 by 14 feet (3 by 4 metres) outside of Lincoln, Montana. The cabin was stocked with notebooks, a coded diary, explosive materials, and two finished bombs.
The Unabomber attracted a fair number of admirers and similarities to Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey, and Daniel Boone as a shady criminal mastermind.
Kaczynski was initially perceived by many as a romantic anti-hero, but after it was revealed that he was actually a wild-eyed hermit with long hair and a beard who spent the winters in a one-room cabin in Montana.