Man held in 18-year hunt for bomber

RUPERT CORNWELL

Washington

Federal police last night searched a house in remote western Montana and took a man into custody, in what could be the biggest breakthrough yet in the search for the Unabomber, responsible for an 18-year campaign of mailbombings across the United States in which three people have died and more than 20 have been injured.

According to radio reports, later confirmed by the FBI, the house near the small town of Lincoln belongs to a man identified to the authorities by his own family as a possible suspect.

He was named last night by federal officials and various media outlets as Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski. He is understood to have no connection to the Freemen sect, a dozen of whose members are currently under siege by the FBI in a ranchhouse near Jordan, at the other end of the same state. ABC News said that Mr Kaczynski was taken into custody - but not actually arrested - after he refused to allow the search.

According to some accounts last night, the suspect is a Harvard University graduate and former professor at the University of California at Berkeley near San Francisco. He now lives in Montana and had been under surveillance for "a short period of time". Other officials said police had been tipped off by the suspect's brother, a Washington-based attorney.

The Unabomber was so named because of his apparent links with university campuses in Chicago, Salt Lake City, and most recently in the San Francisco area. At least until yesterday however, one of the most exhaustive manhunts in US history has succeeded thus far only in establishing an Identikit portrait of a white man, now in his 40s, meticulous of habit, a skilled engineer, and educated enough to write a 35,000 word tract on the evils of industrial society, published in September by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Oakland Tribune, the local paper for UC Berkeley.

Apparently, police suspicions about Mr Kaczynski began to harden after searches of his parents' home in Chicago revealed writings by him with resemblances to the treatises which appeared in the papers. The newspapers had agreed to publish after assurances from the Unabomber that if they did so, he would halt his killing spree. Explosives and other incriminating evidence are also said to have been found by federal agents.

Several of his victims have had links with university life or hi-tech industries. His last victim however was a California timber executive, killed opening a mailbomb in his Sacramento office on April 24, 1995.

The first of the Unabomber's 16 attacks was in May 1978 in Chicago. Only once was he sighted, just before a bombing near a computer store in Salt Lake City.

Along the way he has developed into a skilful amateur chemist and bombmaker. His earlier devices were primitive but in the most recent cases elaborate bombs, about the size of a videocassette, have been his trademark, sometimes coming with his unofficial signature "FC".

That too was the term he used to describe himself (in the plural) in the published tract. But investigators have never believed that the Unabomber was anything other than a single individual.