Known as the Austrian Unabomber, Franz Fuch, an unemployed engineer, was convicted on four counts of murder on March 10, 1999, for a series of letter and pipe bomb attacks that left four people dead. He was also found guilty of more than a dozen cases of causing grievous bodily harm with bombs.
Fuchs, 49, was charged with planting a pipe bomb that killed four Gypsies, or Roma, on February. 4, 1995, at Oberwart in the eastern province of Burgenland, and 28 other bomb attacks that injured a dozen people. His four-year racist bombing spree started in 1993, and targeted mostly ethnic groups or people who supported their rights as refugee.
Most of his attacks were attributed to a mysterious right-wing group calling itself the Bajuvarian Liberation Army. Allegedly the terrorist group wants to reunite German-speaking peoples in Bavaria, the Alps and along the river Danube within borders that existed between the sixth and 12th centuries.Although his defense team argued that he had accomplices, prosecutors insisted Fuchs acted on his own.
Though Fuchs was absent from most of the trial because he repeatedly disrupted the court with nationalistic, anti-foreigner tirades, he did make it into the courtroom for a final statement. True to his past history, he yelled: "Long live the Bajuvarian Liberation Army" and "Long live the ethnic German group."
One of his victims was the former Vienna Mayor Helmut Zilk, whose left hand was mutilated in one explosion. A policeman seeking to de-activate one of the bombs lost both hands. This man, Theo KELZ, was the first one worldwide to have both hands transplanted.

Fuchs was arrested after police were alerted by two women who telephoned to say they thought they were being stalked. A search of his home in Gralla, 130 miles south of Vienna, produced five pipe bombs and a booby-trapped device similar to one that killed the four gypsies in 1995.
According to authorities Fuchs set off an explosion in his car to kill himself when he realized he was getting arrested. The blast ripped through his car, tore off his hands and injured two police officers. Fuchs was described by court psychiatrists as intelligent but a fanatic bent on violence.
Franz FUCHS was sentenced to life in a prison for the mentally dusturbed and commited suicide February 26, 2000. Hard to believe that a man without hands (wearing no artificial limb) should be able to strangulate himself with the cable of his razor...