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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
World
John Dunne

‘Unabomber’ responsible for reign of terror in US dies in jail aged 81

A Harvard-educated mathematician branded the ‘Unabomber’ after he killed three people in a 17-year reign of terror has died in a US jail aged 81.

Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, lived in a Montana shack where he plotted bomb attacks which also injured 23.

Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina.

He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8am. A cause of death was not immediately known, prison officials said.

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.

He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims. He was against advancing technology and its impact on the environment. He wrote 35,000 word Industrial Society and Its Future to express his views.

Kaczynski’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans mailed packages and boarded airplanes, even virtually shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995.

Authorities in April 1996 found him in a shack with a coded diary, explosive ingredients and two completed bombs.

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