Unabomber Ted Kaczynski found dead in US prison cell

Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, has been found dead in his prison cell, federal officials confirmed to the BBC.

Kaczynski, 81, killed three people and injured 23 more during a mass mail-bombing spree between 1978 and 1995. He later pleaded guilty to his crimes.

He was sentenced to life without parole in 1996 after evading capture for almost 20 years.

The Harvard-trained mathematician was eventually caught in a Montana cabin.

He was a man who fascinated America for decades, and he became the focus of numerous TV documentaries.

Kaczynski spent the past three decades held at prisons across the US - most recently at a North Carolina prison medical facility.

Prison guards at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, discovered Kaczynski's body this morning at around 00:25 local time, a spokesperson for the US Bureau of Prisons told the BBC.

"Responding staff immediately initiated life-saving measures," the spokesperson added. "Mr Kaczynski was transported by EMS to a local hospital and subsequently pronounced deceased by hospital personnel."

Before suffering from declining health which prompted his transfer to the facility in December 2021, he had been held at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, since May 1998.

His violent campaign left a number of his victims permanently maimed.

But his crimes were uncovered after he forced the Washington Post and the New York Times to publish his unhinged and violent manifesto, called Industrial Society and Its Future, in September 1995.

They agreed to print the manifesto on the recommendation of the FBI and the US attorney general after Kaczynski said he would end his campaign if a national paper published his treatise.

The 35,000-word anonymised document railed against modern life and claimed that technology was leading to Americans suffering from a sense of alienation and powerlessness.

After reading the papers, Kaczynski's brother and sister-in-law recognised the tone and alerted the FBI, who had been searching for him for years in the nation's longest manhunt.

In April 1996 authorities finally found the Harvard trained mathematician in a 10-by-14-foot (3-by-4-meter) plywood and tarpaper cabin outside Lincoln, Montana.

The hut was filled with journals, a coded diary, explosives and two completed bombs.

While the manifesto struck many as being overtly political in tone, Kaczynski never sought to embody the revolutionary mantle some attributed to him.

In his own journals he wrote that he didn't claim to be "altruist or to be acting for the 'good' (whatever that is) of the human race", instead insisting that he acted "merely from a desire for revenge".

His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague who had dumped him after two dates.

From there he retreated to the Montana wildness and to the cabin he had built by hand, without heating, plumbing or electricity.

His first attacks targeted Northwestern University in Illinois. The two bombing occurred almost a year apart on 25 May 1978 and 9 May 1979, injuring two people.

Then, in November 1979, an altitude-triggered bomb he mailed in 1979 went off aboard an American Airlines flight. Twelve people suffered from smoke inhalation.

The attacks earned him the monicker Unabomber from the FBI, as his targets seemed to be universities and airlines.