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Kaczynski indicted in four Unabomber attacks, could face death

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Federal prosecutors charged Theodore Kaczynski in four of the bloodiest Unabomber attacks Tuesday in an indictment calculated to bring the death penalty for the math professor-turned-hermit.
A federal grand jury charged Kaczynski in two fatal bombings in Sacramento in 1985 and 1995 and two attacks that maimed scientists at Yale and the University of California in 1993.
Both Sacramento attacks are covered by the new federal death penalty, the Justice Department said.
The indictment marks the first time Kaczynski was charged in the 18-year campaign of terror aimed at smashing the modern industrial order.
Since his arrest April 3 at his crude mountain cabin, Kaczynski, 54, has been held in a Montana jail, charged only with possessing bomb-making material.
The Justice Department said it will now ask that those charges be temporarily dismissed so the former Berkeley math professor can be brought quickly to Sacramento for arraignment.
The Unabomber’s 16 attacks killed three people and injured 23. Prosecutors had said they would seek to indict Kaczynski in either Northern California or New Jersey, because the fatal attacks in those states would be subject to the federal death penalty law enacted in 1994.
The 10-count indictment identifies Kaczynski as “FC,” the initials the Unabomber used to sign his letters and diatribes. He claimed the initials stood for an underground organization called the Freedom Club. FBI agents discount the existence of any organization, however, saying the Unabomber was a loner.
The indictment charges Kaczynski in the first fatal Unabomber attack — a 1985 blast in which a package left in the parking lot of a Sacramento computer rental store exploded, killing store owner Hugh Scrutton. Another count covers the last fatal Unabomber attack, which killed timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray in April 1995.
Kaczynski is also charged with attacks that seriously injured Dr. Charles Epstein of the University of California at San Francisco, who lost several fingers in a June 1993 bombing, and Yale computer expert David Gelernter, who suffered injuries to his hands, face and chest in an attack two days later.
The indictment also charges Kaczynski with transporting, mailing and using bombs.
The indictment does not mention bombings in the San Francisco, Chicago and Salt Lake City areas, or those in Tennessee and Michigan. Those areas do not fall within the Sacramento jurisdiction.
For an agonizingly long time, the Unabomber trail was icy cold, as a San Francisco-based task force of two dozen agents from the FBI, Treasury Department and Post Office sifted travel records, tips, interviews, lab results and case records searching for clues.The attacker was dubbed the Unabomber because early bombings had targeted universities and airlines.
Wood seemed to be important to the bomber, investigators said. Sometimes bomb parts were carved from wood; sometimes the videocassette-sized devices were encased in wood.
In September, The New York Times and Washington Post published in the Post the Unabomber’s treatise on the inhumanity of industrial society. He had promised to stop planting bombs that kill people if it was printed.
Then a tip from David Kaczynski in February pointed investigators toward his brother. David Kaczynski became suspicious when he noticed similarities between his brother’s writings and published Unabomber documents.
In the two months before Kaczynski’s arrest, investigators found that the writings shared certain phrases and misspellings. DNA tests of saliva found on two letters — one sent by the Unabomber and one by Kaczynski to his family — showed a genetic link.
The search of Kaczynski’s cabin turned up the original of the Unabomber’s 35,000-word, anti-technology manifesto, a typewriter used for the manifesto, bombs and bomb parts, detonators and even the 9-digit identification number used by the bomber.

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