Death Penalty News

WASHINGTON (AP) — Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the Harvard-educated mathematician who retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others, died Saturday. He was 81. 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.

Two men linked to the Islamic State (IS) group have been convicted in Australia of plotting to blow up a flight using a concealed bomb. Mahmoud Khayat, 34, aimed to bring down the Sydney to Abu Dhabi flight in July 2017, a jury found on Thursday. His brother, Khaled Khayat, 51, was found guilty of the same offence in May. Both men had pleaded not guilty. Their plan failed when the bag carrying the bomb could not be checked in at the airport because it was overweight. Prosecutors said they had aimed to blow up the flight carrying 400 passengers with military grade explosives concealed inside a meat grinder. After it failed, the brothers also planned to carry out a chemical gas attack in Sydney, prosecutors said. They were arrested 11 days after the airport incident. A third brother, Amer Khayat, had carried the bag to Sydney Airport but was not part of the plot. Authorities said his brothers had planted the bomb in luggage without his knowledge. Mahmoud an...