John McAfee’s Death Was Likely Suicide, Spanish Authorities Say

“Everything signifies that it could be a loss of life by suicide,” a spokeswoman for the Justice Division of the Catalan regional government informed The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

The spokeswoman said that a regional judicial delegation is investigating the result in and situation of Mr. McAfee’s loss of life and took his overall body absent from the jail to have out an autopsy.

Mr. McAfee’s overall body was located in his mobile at around 7 p.m. regional time. Protection staff experimented with to resuscitate him, but the jail’s health care workforce afterwards declared him useless, the spokeswoman said.

Mr. McAfee shared the mobile with an additional man, but he was on your own when he was located, she said. The spokeswoman said she could not comment further.

His Spanish law firm, Javier Villalba, said the director of the prison where by Mr. McAfee was detained informed him on Wednesday that his customer was located hanging. He said that he was not given much more information about the situation and that he was waiting for the results of the investigation getting carried out by Spanish authorities.

The spokeswoman of the Justice Division of the Catalan government declined to comment on Mr. Villalba’s remarks. The director of the prison could not be reached to comment.

A spokeswoman for the Significant Court of Justice of Catalonia in Barcelona, which is dealing with the investigation on Mr. McAfee’s loss of life, said she could not validate the result in of his loss of life until finally the results of his autopsy ended up released. That could choose a number of times, she said.

Mr. McAfee’s loss of life caught his Spanish law firm by surprise. He said Mr. McAfee has usually been “combative.”

“He has never given any signal he could have taken his own daily life,” Mr. Villalba informed the Journal. “It’s an uncomfortable surprise, a thing we could not assume at all. We really don’t recognize it.”

Nishay K. Sanan, an attorney representing Mr. McAfee in U.S. legal proceedings, said Mr. McAfee “was and will usually be remembered as a fighter.”

“He experimented with to really like this state but the U.S. government built his existence impossible,” Mr. Sanan said.

Mr. McAfee took a lengthy and circuitous route to Spain. He lived in Belize for several years, leaving in 2012 when authorities there wished to query him in relationship with the suspected murder of his neighbor, Gregory Faull, who was located with a gunshot wound to the head. Mr. McAfee, who said he was fearful of getting established up, asserted his innocence and fled to Guatemala.

He was afterwards arrested for illegally moving into Guatemala and deported to the U.S., where by he pursued his interest in libertarian politics, briefly seeking the nomination of the Libertarian Social gathering as its prospect for the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

In 2019, Mr. McAfee announced he would continue on his campaign in exile, as he put it, soon after stating he ran afoul of U.S. tax authorities.

“I’ve not paid out taxes for 8 several years. I make no top secret of it. I have not submitted returns. Each calendar year I explain to the IRS ‘I am not submitting a return, I have no intention of doing so, arrive and find me,’” he said in a video he posted to

Twitter.

Soon after his arrest in Spain in October, Mr. McAfee submitted a ask for to Spanish judicial authorities to be freed while waiting for a conclusion on his extradition to the U.S.

On the other hand, in December, a courtroom rejected his ask for, stating that he was a flight danger and that remaining in the jail near Barcelona did not pose a danger to his wellbeing.

In the course of a courtroom hearing about his extradition, Mr. McAfee said that the rates versus him had a political motive and that if he was despatched to the U.S. he would spend the relaxation of his daily life in prison. The Spanish courtroom dismissed his claims because of to a deficiency of evidence.

Mr. McAfee established the corporation that still bears his identify in 1987, but he offered his stake in the 1990s for much more than $100 million.

—Bowdeya Tweh contributed to this article.

Create to Giovanni Legorano at [email protected]