THE BROTHER of Unabomber suspect Mr Theodore Kaczynski undertook his own investigation before putting the FBI on the trail, a lawyer said yesterday.
Mr David Kaczynski hid his fears from his aging mother Wanda until two weeks ago when the FBI's evidence had mounted and the arrest of brother Theodore as the main suspect in America's 17 year mail bomb terror campaign was imminent.
"She expressed her sincere belief that Ted could not be the Unabomber... but if he was, he had to be stopped," lawyer Mr Anthony Bisceglie told a news conference in Washington.
No one in the family had any idea of what turned a loving brother and brilliant scholar into a recluse and alleged serial bomber, Mr Bisceglie said, adding "We may never know."
In Washington, Justice Department officials met federal prosecutors from at least seven states around the country to consider how to proceed as FBI agents build a case.
Officials said issues included pressing more charges, where to hold the trial and whether to seek the death penalty.
Mr Theodore Kaczynski (53), a Harvard trained mathematician who abandoned an academic career for a life as a hermit in a shack in Montana, is being held in jail in Helena, Montana, on a charge of possessing bomb making components.
Mr Bisceglie said Mr David Kaczynski, who provided the FBI with the documentary materials that led them to his brother, contacted federal investigators because of his "very sincere desire to make sure that no further lives were lost if indeed his brother was involved".
The solicitor said David spent months examining incriminating, letters and documents of his brother's on his own, with a private investigator, with his lawyer and then the FBI.
No one has claimed a million dollar reward in the case. Mr Bisceglie said the family is considering donating it to the bomber's victims and their survivors. Three people were killed and 23 injured by parcels sent all over the US.
The lawyer said the family knew of no violence in the suspect's past but recalled that as a youth he had fashioned his own rockets out of metal pipes, concocting fuel by mixing chemicals himself.
Earlier reports said Mr Kaczynski got suspicious after finding some old documents in his widowed mother's house.
Mr Bisceglie said the doubts in fact arose after Mr Kaczynski read about the criminologists' profile of the Unabomber and found that, like his brother, the suspect was believed to be Chicago born, to hate technology, to be highly educated and have links to Berkeley, California, and Utah.
Last October, he read the Unabomber's long diatribe against modern technology published in consultation with the FBI by the New York Times and Washington Post. He saw disturbing similarities in ideology, phraseology and spelling to his brother's letters home.