John McAfee, the founder of antivirus company McAfee, found dead in Spanish prison apnews.com

Photo: AP

John McAfee, the creator of McAfee antivirus software, was found dead in his jail cell near Barcelona in an apparent suicide Wednesday, hours after a Spanish court approved his extradition to the United States to face tax charges punishable by decades in prison, authorities said.

The eccentric cryptocurrency promoter and tax opponent whose history of legal troubles spanned from Tennessee to Central America to the Caribbean reportedly killed himself.

Security personnel tried to revive him, but the jail’s medical team finally certified his death, a statement from the regional Catalan government said.

“A judicial delegation has arrived to investigate the causes of death,” it said, adding that “everything points to death by suicide.”

According to the newspaper El Pais, the software entrepreneur was arrested in October and was awaiting extradition to the US when he was found dead.

The paper added that police are investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.

McAfee, the British-born U.S. tech mogul had been charged with several federal financial crimes in two US districts. In the Western District of Tennessee, Mr McAfee was indicted in October on ten counts of allegedly evading taxes on millions of dollars of income.

In a Manhattan federal court in March, he was charged for a scheme involving cryptocurrency, which he was pushing on social media.

The charges carried a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

A statement from the regional Catalan government didn’t identify the American tycoon by name but said he was a 75-year-old US citizen awaiting extradition to the country.

Nishay Sanan, the Chicago-based attorney defending him on those cases, said by phone to the Associated Press that McAfee “will always be remembered as a fighter.”

“He tried to love this country but the U.S. government made his existence impossible,” Sanan said. “They tried to erase him, but they failed.”

The lawyer said Spanish authorities have not given his legal team a cause of death, and he wants to know if there were video cameras in McAfee’s cell or in the prison, AP reported.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Memphis declined to comment.

But, according to Reuters, McAfee’s lawyer, Javier Villalba, said the anti-virus software pioneer died by hanging as his nine months in prison brought him to despair.

During a court hearing last month, McAfee, 75, said that given his age, he would spend the rest of his life in jail if convicted in the United States, Reuters reported. “I am hoping that the Spanish court will see the injustice of this,” he said, adding “the United States wants to use me as an example.”

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