Ted Kaczynski, who was branded the Unabomber, has been found dead in his US prison cell at the age of 81.
Kaczynski, who was serving life without the possibility of parole following his 1996 arrest at the primitive cabin where he was living in western Montana, was found dead around 8am (local time) at a federal prison in North Carolina.
The cause of death was not immediately known.
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The Harvard-educated mathematician ran a 17-year bombing campaign that terrorised the US. From 1978 to 1995 he was responsible for the deaths of three people and the injury of 23.
Years before the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way people in the US mailed packages and boarded aeroplanes.
After evading capture for almost two decades, he eventually enacted his own undoing when he forced The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.
Kaczynski’s brother David and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognized 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 10-by-14-foot plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, that was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.
He pleaded guilty to setting 16 explosions that killed three people and injured 23 others in various parts of America between 1978 and 1995.
Following two decades in a federal Supermax prison in Colorado for a series of bombings that targeted scientists, he was moved to the federal prison medical facility in North Carolina.
In February 2020, Netflix released a crime documentary four-part miniseries about Kaczynski titled Unabomber: In His Own Words that delved into his 17 years evading capture and terrorising the US.
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