At the age of 81 – USA: The “Una bomber” died in prison – News

• Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician and convicted felon who became known as the “Una Bomber,” has died.
• He died in a federal prison in North Carolina at the age of 81, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons told The Associated Press on Saturday.
• Nothing is currently known about the circumstances of his death.
• Kaczynski carried out several bombings between 1978 and 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 others.

Former mathematics professor Kaczynski had terrorized the United States with mysterious bomb attacks. His attacks were mostly directed against representatives of universities and airlines, which earned him the name “Una bomber” after the initials of these targets.

Kaczynski is said to have been driven by hatred of technology. The Harvard graduate targeted academics and airline executives, as well as business lobbyists and computer business owners. He also attempted to blow up an airliner. For years the police didn’t find out about him.

FBI: “Mad Genius”

Kaczynski lived in a lonely part of the state of Montana in a hut without electricity or running water and built his bombs there. He detonated a total of 17 explosive devices. Some of the injured lost fingers, hearing or vision.

Ted Kaczynski was finally caught after his brother David gave the police the crucial tip: when the “Una bomber” managed to get a 35,000-word manifesto published in the newspapers in September 1995, David recognized the text as inciting his brothers against technology. Ted Kaczynski was arrested a good six months later.

The FBI described him as “a mad genius” trying to be a perfect killer. In court, Kaczynski resisted the public defender’s attempt to classify him as mentally ill. With a confession he avoided the death penalty and in May 1998 he was sentenced to four life sentences and an additional 30 years in prison.

According to ABC News, Kaczynski was transferred to North Carolina from a maximum-security prison in Colorado in December 2021 because of his poor health. He was found in his cell on Saturday morning (local time) and later pronounced dead at a hospital in the city of Butner, according to prison officials.

Reason for radicalization unclear

Kaczynski was born in Chicago in May 1942 to a working-class Polish-American family. He was considered a quiet, highly intelligent student. Friends from his youth reported that he was already making small explosive devices when he was twelve to 13 years old. He finished high school at age 15 and got a scholarship to Harvard University, where he studied mathematics.

At the time of the Vietnam War protests in 1967, he received his PhD from the University of Michigan and shortly thereafter became a professor of mathematics at Berkeley, California. A few years later, he resigned without giving a reason and moved to his cabin in Montana. There he was arrested in April 1996 in a neglected state. What exactly triggered his radicalization is unclear.