Unabomber

Unabomber News History

Copyright 1995 Telegraph Group Limited

The Daily Telegraph

April 27, 1995, Thursday

SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 9

LENGTH: 390 words

HEADLINE: Letters from anarchist bomber taunt FBI men

BYLINE: By Charles Laurence in New York

BODY:

A SERIAL bomber has described his motives in greater detail than before after his 16th attack in 17 years killed an executive in California on Monday. The FBI said the man, known as Unabomber, sent three letters when posting the device that killed Gilbert Murray, the president of the pro-logging California Forestry Association, in Sacramento. Two letters went to survivors of previous bombs. In the third, to the New York Times, he repeated claims to be a member of an anarchist group and defined his targets as leaders in technological fields considered destructive to the environment. Targets have been university professors, scientists and people engaged in environmentally sensitive work. The FBI called him Unabomber because his first targets were university executives and airlines. "We have nothing against universities or scholars as such. All the university people we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields. (We consider certain areas of applied psychology, such as behaviour modification, to be technical fields)," he wrote. "We would not want anyone to think we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers, especially in computers and genetics." Monday's device, wrapped immaculately in a parcel the size of a shoebox, bore the Unabomber hallmarks of components fashioned by hand from wood and metal. The FBI says his bombs usually contain wooden components which would take hours to carve. His targets and the return addresses he puts on the parcels often include the words "wood", or "forest". In the letter, he complained: "We are getting tired of making bombs." Special Agent Jim Freeman, the head of the FBI's San Francisco unit, who is leading the hunt, said: "This guy has flipped out. He is describing his actions and motives for the first time." In the last attack, in December 1994, a mail bomb killed Thomas Mosser, an advertising executive, at his New Jersey home. The first, on May 25, 1978, injured a security guard at Northwestern University, Illinois. The letter indicated Unabomber was confident he would not be caught: "We are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it doesn't appear that the FBI is going to catch us anytime soon. The FBI is a joke."