John McAfee, founder of the eponymous anti-virus company, is on the run after allegedly killing another US citizen in a resort town, Belizean police said on Monday.
Police raided McAfee’s mansion on Ambergris Caye, an island off the northeastern coast of Belize, late on Sunday to question him about the murder of American Gregory Faull, but McAfee was nowhere to be found, said the head of the country’s anti-organized crime brigade, Marco Vidal.
Vidal told reporters that McAfee was wanted “for homicide.”
However, McAfee told the US magazine Wired that he was in fact hiding on the property at the time, burying himself in the sand with a cardboard box over his head in order to breathe.
“It was extraordinarily uncomfortable, but they will kill me if they find me,” he said.
Vidal’s officers searched McAfee’s mansion several months ago looking for weapons and drugs, and detained him for several hours.
McAfee claims he was arrested at the time because he refused to make a donation to a local politician’s campaign.
Florida native Faull, 52, was found dead at his home by his housekeeper on Sunday morning.
At the crime scene, investigators found a 9mm shell, “consistent with the wound in the back of Faull’s neck,” Belizean National Security Ministry spokesman Rafael Martinez said.
A police report said there were no signs of a break-in, and that a laptop and cellphone were missing.
Residents of the island, known for scuba diving, tropical fishing and its US expatriate community, told the Web site Gizmodo that Faull and McAfee had a recent fallout.
According to Gizmodo, which quoted locals speaking on condition of anonymity, McAfee had displayed increasingly erratic behavior and was estranged from the expatriate community.
Gizmodo also reported that McAfee had been experimenting with psychoactive drugs.
Asked about the shooting of his neighbor, McAfee told Wired that he knew “nothing” other than Faull had been shot. The anti-virus pioneer even said he was worried that Faull’s killers had actually been looking for him.
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