FBI Trap Mad Bomber
Professor killed and maimed in 18-year vendetta against scientists.

A MAD professor was behind bars last night - after a warped 18- year crusade of murder against science and scientists.

Loner Theodore John Kaczynski - said by FBI agents to be the notorious Unabomber - was seized at his mountain shack in Montana after the longest manhunt in American history.

The brilliant but evil hermit killed three people and wounded 23 in his one-man protest against the advances of technology.

But his war against progress ended when Kaczynski, 53, a former maths professor at Berkeley University, California, was betrayed by his own family.

His Buddhist brother David, a man horrified by violence, tipped off the FBI.

And on Wednesday, 20 armed agents burst into his cabin and seized the man who had eluded America's top lawmen for more than 6,000 days.

They brought to an end the mission of a crazed bomber who ruthlessly killed scientists and computer technicians in an attempt to hobble technology, which he saw as "dehumanising."

He regarded computers as the root of all evil. Many of the devices mailed to his targets had the letters FC - short for `F***ing Computers' - stamped on components.

The bombs he made were hand-carved wooden masterpieces of a craftsmanship which he considered was declining in modern society.

Kaczynski even made two top newspapers bow to his will last year.

Frustrated by all efforts to catch him, FBI and President Clinton's aides pleaded with the Washington Times and Washington Post to print extracts from his warped gospel in case he killed again.

The papers complied, devoting whole pages to his rambling 35,000-word manifesto, advocating a return to pre-industrial communities of 100 people and the abandonment of scientific research.

The FBI pored over every word of his diatribe, searching for the phrase or word that might give him away.

They scoured colleges and laboratories, interviewing professors and faculty heads about former students whose skills and outlook matched those of the Unabomber.

The breakthrough came on Wednesday afternoon. The FBI were led to the decrepit cabin where he made his bombs by a lawyer representing his family.

Two months ago, his brother David was clearing out the attic of the old family home near Chicago. He found Kaczynski's writings from his Berkeley days - in which he spelled out his loony ideas.

The FBI seized the papers and found plane tickets to California that coincided with dates of some of his attacks.

They began a lengthy surveillance on Kaczynski's Montana shack near Stemple Pass - a home without lighting, heating or electricity, in-line with his back-to-basics philosophy.

Ironically, the FBI used orbiting satellites to bug his home - a high- tech touch he would have despised.

On Wednesday the agents knocked on his door.

"Ted, we'd like to have a talk," said an agent. Kaczynski struggled to escape through a back door. He was hurled to the floor, handcuffed and led away.

In the shack, agents discovered bus-ticket stubs to Sacramento - scene of the last Unabomber attack - electrical wiring of the sort used in his devices and some anti-science literature.

They also discovered evidence of aliases he used - Walter Teszewski II and Ted Dombek among them.

Kaczynski was under armed guard at an FBI building in Helena, Montana, last night as more experts flew in to sift for evidence linking him to the bombings. Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in a Chicago suburb to Polish parents Theodore and Wanda.

He soon showed his brilliance at mathematics. At 13, he was setting complex theorems that baffled his teachers.

Apart from that, he seemed a normal boy. He played trombone in the school band, studied the stars with a telescope and said he wanted to be an astronaut.

Kaczynski graduated from Harvard in 1962, and went on to earn a PhD at the University of Michigan, where his hatred of progress first emerged.

He began reading literature on alternative societies, formulating theories about feudal communities, much like those which existed in medieval England.

Kaczynski went on to teach maths at Berkeley, and that was where the clever academic finally went over the edge.

He resigned in 1969 and moved to Utah a year later. He did odd jobs and labouring before scraping enough money together in 1971 to move to Montana where he built his shack.

On his wobbly bicycle he could be seen pedalling into the local grocery store - dressed in military fatigues - to shop for vegetarian food.

Vicki Morris, a waitress at a local restaurant, said: "He was very dirty and he smelled. But he had no-one to impress.

"What's he going to get spruced up for - a tree?"

Surrounded by the works of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann, Kaczynski worked by oil-lamp to build his deadly devices.

Two bombs went to his old campus, Berkeley. In 1982, he bombed the staffroom and in 1985, the computer room.

But in the attic of his old home, his evil past was catching up with him.

His brother David and mother Wanda were under armed guard last night.

His father committed suicide in 1990 after severe depression.

THIS is the timetable of the Unabomber's 18-year reign of terror:

• MAY 26, 1978 - A package bomb intended for a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, injured a police officer who opened it.

• JUNE 10, 1980 - A parcel bomb injured an airline executive at his Chicago home.

• MAY 15, 1985 - A parcel bomb blew off a graduate's fingers at Berkeley University, California.

• DEC 11, 1985 - Computer store owner Hugh Scruton, 36, was killed by a bomb at Sacramento, California.

• JUNE 22, 1993 - A geneticist was seriously hurt by a package bomb in Tiburon, Calif.

• JUNE 24, 1993 - A computer science professor was severely injured by a parcel bomb at Yale University.

• Manifesto

• DEC 10, 1994 - Advertising executive Thomas Mosser, 50, was killed by a package bomb at his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey.

• APRIL 24, 1995 - Forestry Association boss Gilbert Murray, 47, was killed when he opened a package addressed to an ex-employee in Sacramento.

• JUNE, 1995 - The Una-bomber told the Washington Times and the Washington Post he would stop killing if they printed his manifesto of ideas.

• SEPT 19, 1995 - The two papers published the 35,000-word manifesto.

• APRIL 3, 1996 - Theo-dore Kaczynski was arrested at his mountain cabin in Montana.