Unabomber Ted Kaczynski found dead in US prison cell
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo
Ted Kaczynski, more commonly known as the Unabomber, has died in prison.
Kaczynski, who was 81, carried out a string of bombing attacks between 1978 and 1995 which saw three people killed and 23 injured. He evaded authorities for more than 20 years before being sentenced to life in prison in 1996.
Officials say that Kaczynski was found in his cell at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. Guards discovered his body on Saturday morning (10 June) at around 00.25 local time.
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A spokesperson said: "Responding staff immediately initiated life-saving measures."
They added that Kaczynski was then 'transported by EMS to a local hospital and subsequently pronounced deceased by hospital personnel'.
Kaczynski, who was a Harvard-trained mathematician, was eventually discovered in a cabin in Montana measuring 10ft by 14ft, and sentenced to life in prison. He had been incarcerated in a number of institutions since then.
He became infamous in part due to his manifesto, called Industrial Society and Its Future, was forcibly published in the Washington Post and the New York Times in 1995.
Kaczynski had said that he would end his campaign if a national newspaper published his manifesto, and both titles were advised to do so by the FBI.
The document, which was some 35,000 words long, railed against modern American life. It said that Americans had begun to suffer from a profound sense of powerlessness in their modern existence.
As a result of the publication, Kaczynski's sister-in-law and brother both recognised his tone, and were able to confirm his identity to the authorities.
In April 1996, following a nationwide manhunt, he was finally caught in a tiny hut in Montana. Police found two completed bombs, along with explosives, journals, and a coded diary.
Kaczynski's deadly homemade bombs changed the way that Americans boarded planes and posted letters to each other, having a profound impact on air travel before the 11 September attacks.
His personal journals were also released, in which he claimed not to be acting out of any sense of revolutionary fervour. Instead he wanted 'simply personal revenge'.
He wrote: “I often had fantasies of killing the kind of people I hated - i.e., government officials, police, computer scientists, the rowdy type of college students who left their beer cans in the arboretum, etc., etc., etc."
Three people were killed during his campaign of bomb attacks. They were owner of a computer rental shop Hugh Scrutton, advertising executive Thomas Mosser, as well as timber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray.
A cause of death for Kaczynski has not been released.