CAUSE OF DEATH: Republicans believe Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, died of cancer after being found dead in prison

Republicans believe Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, died of cancer after being found dead in prison.

Notorious domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the ‘Unabomber’, has died aged 81 in federal prison, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said Saturday.

Kaczynski was found dead around 8 a.m. at a federal prison in North Carolina. A cause of death was not immediately known. Branded the “Unabomber” by the FBI, Kaczynski died at the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, Kristie Breshears, a spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons, told The Associated Press. He was found unresponsive in his cell early Saturday morning and was pronounced dead around 8 a.m., she said. A cause of death was not immediately known.

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 that set universities nationwide on edge. He admitted committing 16 bombings from 1978 and 1995, permanently maiming several of his victims.

Kaczynski was captured after a years-long manhunt tracked him to a primitive cabin in western Montana woodland, where he built the explosives he used to kill three people and injure 23 others between 1978 and 1995. 

He had been moved to the federal prison medical facility in North Carolina after spending two decades in a federal Supermax prison in Colorado. Kaczynski was a Harvard educated mathematician who later retreated to the Montana wilderness after coming to believe technology would spell the end of civilization. 

He executed a sinister plan to detonate explosives in universities and airports, which he would often mail to his victims using the postal service. 

Years before the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailing, the Unabomber’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. 

He published a sprawling 35,000 word manifesto named ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’, which claimed modern society was plagued by the increasing role of technology in everyday life. 

While the fear he spurred led The Washington Post and The New York Times to take the agonizing decision in September 1995 to publish the manifesto, it ultimately led to his undoing.