Washington: Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a shack in the Montana woods and led a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday . He was 81 years old.
They attacked academics, businessmen, and random citizens with homemade bombs from 1978 to 1995, with the stated goal of the collapse of the modern social order—a violent spree that often ended after what has been described as the longest and most expensive pursuit in the U.S. happened. History.
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 on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Prior to his transfer to a prison medical facility, he had been held at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences and 30 years for a campaign of terror that shored up universities across the country. Was. He admitted to 16 bombings that left many of his victims permanently crippled.
Years before the September 11 attacks and anthrax mailings, the Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans sent packages and boarded airplanes, even nearly shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995. Gave.
He forced The Washington Post, along with the New York Times, to make the painful decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, which claimed that modern society and technology were one Leading to emotion. powerlessness and isolation.
But it led to his ruin. Kaczynski’s brother, David, and David’s wife, Linda Patrick, recognized the tone of the text and tipped off the FBI. In April 1996 authorities found him in a 3-by-4-metre plywood cabin in Montana, filled with magazines, a coded diary, explosive material and two full bombs.
In his own journals, Kaczynski came across not as a committed revolutionary but as a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances. “I certainly do not claim to be a philanthropist or to work for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of mankind,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I only act out of a desire for revenge.”
Kaczynski was certainly a genius. He skipped two grades to attend Harvard at age 16 and published papers in prestigious math journals. His explosives were carefully tested and came in wooden boxes carefully sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the sign “FC” for “Freedom Club”. ,
The FBI called him the “Unbomber” because his early targets seemed to be universities and airlines.
They attacked academics, businessmen, and random citizens with homemade bombs from 1978 to 1995, with the stated goal of the collapse of the modern social order—a violent spree that often ended after what has been described as the longest and most expensive pursuit in the U.S. happened. History.
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 on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Prior to his transfer to a prison medical facility, he had been held at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado since May 1998, when he was sentenced to four life sentences and 30 years for a campaign of terror that shored up universities across the country. Was. He admitted to 16 bombings that left many of his victims permanently crippled.
Years before the September 11 attacks and anthrax mailings, the Unabomber’s deadly homemade bombs changed the way Americans sent packages and boarded airplanes, even nearly shutting down air travel on the West Coast in July 1995. Gave.
He forced The Washington Post, along with the New York Times, to make the painful decision in September 1995 to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, which claimed that modern society and technology were one Leading to emotion. powerlessness and isolation.
But it led to his ruin. Kaczynski’s brother, David, and David’s wife, Linda Patrick, recognized the tone of the text and tipped off the FBI. In April 1996 authorities found him in a 3-by-4-metre plywood cabin in Montana, filled with magazines, a coded diary, explosive material and two full bombs.
In his own journals, Kaczynski came across not as a committed revolutionary but as a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances. “I certainly do not claim to be a philanthropist or to work for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of mankind,” he wrote on April 6, 1971. “I only act out of a desire for revenge.”
Kaczynski was certainly a genius. He skipped two grades to attend Harvard at age 16 and published papers in prestigious math journals. His explosives were carefully tested and came in wooden boxes carefully sanded to remove possible fingerprints. Later bombs bore the sign “FC” for “Freedom Club”. ,
The FBI called him the “Unbomber” because his early targets seemed to be universities and airlines.