Autopsy ordered into McAfee death
Print Edition
AUTHORITIES in Spain say a judge has ordered an autopsy for John McAfee, the gun-loving antivirus pioneer, cryptocurrency promoter and occasional politician who died in a prison cell pending extradition to the United States for allegedly evading millions in unpaid taxes.
A court spokeswoman for the Catalonia region said yesterday that a forensic team would need to perform toxicology tests on McAfee’s body to determine the cause of death and that results could take “days or weeks.”
Authorities say everything at the scene indicated that the 75-year-old tycoon killed himself.
McAfee’s Spanish lawyer, Javier Villalba, said the entrepreneur’s death had come as a surprise to his wife and other relatives, adding he would seek to get “to the bottom” of his client’s death.
“This has been like pouring cold water on the family and on his defense team,” Villalba said yesterday.
“Nobody expected it, he had not said goodbye.”
Although Villalba said he had no evidence of any foul play but blamed the death on “the cruelty of the system” for keeping a 75-year-old behind bars for economic, not violent, crimes after judges refused to release him on bail.
Spain’s National Court on Monday ruled that McAfee should be extradited to the US to face charges for evading more than US$4 million in taxes in the fiscal years 2016 to 2018. The judge dropped seven of the 10 counts in the initial indictment.
Villalba said McAfee had learned about the ruling on Tuesday and that his death on Wednesday didn’t come in the heat of the moment. He also said McAfee and the legal team had been preparing an appeal to avoid being extradited.
A penitentiary source told the AP that McAfee was sharing a cell in the Brians 2 jail where he had been put in preventive detention since he was arrested in October last year on a US warrant, but that at the moment of his death he had been alone.
Days after the arrest he tweeted from prison: “All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.” He was referring to registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in a US jail in 2019.
By April, McAfee was complaining he had only limited human contact and “no entertainments — no escape from loneliness, from emptiness, from myself.”
Prosecutors in Tennessee accused McAfee of failing to report income from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consulting work, earnings made in speaking engagements and for selling the rights to his life story for a documentary. The criminal charges carried a prison sentence of up to 30 years.
The British-born entrepreneur led an eccentric life after selling his stake in the antivirus software company named after him in the 1990s.
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