John McAfee, the creator of the McAfee antivirus software, has been found dead in his cell in a jail near Barcelona, a government official told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

       Authorities said the cause of death was being investigated.

       Hours earlier, a Spanish court had issued a preliminary ruling in favor of the 75-year-old tycoon’s extradition to the United States to face tax-related criminal charges that could carry decades in prison.

       Security personnel at the Brians 2 penitentiary near the northeastern Spanish city were unable to revive him, a statement from the regional Catalan government said.

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

       The statement didn’t identify McAfee by name but said he was a 75-year-old U.S. citizen awaiting extradition to his country. A Catalan government source familiar with the event who was not authorized to be named in media reports confirmed to the AP that the dead man was McAfee.

       Spain’s National Court on Monday ruled in favor of extraditing McAfee, who had argued in a hearing earlier this month that the charges against him by prosecutors in Tennessee were politically motivated and that he would spend the rest of his life in prison if he were returned to the U.S.

       The court’s ruling was made public Wednesday and could have been appealed. Any final extradition order would also have needed approval from the Spanish Cabinet.

       Prosecutors in Tennessee charged McAfee with evading taxes after failing to report income made from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consultancy work, as well as income from speaking engagements and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary. The criminal charges carry a prison sentence of up to 30 years.

       The entrepreneur was arrested last October at Barcelona’s international airport. A judge ordered at the time that McAfee be held in jail while awaiting the outcome of an extradition hearing.

       McAfee led an eccentric life after he sold his stake in the antivirus software company named after him in the early 1990s.

       He twice ran long-shot bids for U.S. president and was a participant in Libertarian Party presidential debates in 2016.

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       In 2012, while McAfee was living on an island off the coast of Belize, police named him a “person of interest” in the fatal shooting of his neighbor. He fled to Guatemala, saying he believed he would be killed if Belize officials captured him, and ended up returning to the United States.

       In July 2019, he was released from detention in the Dominican Republic after he and five others were suspected of traveling on a yacht carrying high-caliber weapons, ammunition and military-style gear, officials on the Caribbean island said at the time.

       The last post from McAfee’s Twitter account was a retweet of a Father’s Day message from his wife, Janice McAfee.

       “These eight months John has spent in prison in Spain have been especially hard on his overall health both mentally and physically, as well as financially, but he is undeterred from continuing to speak truth to power,” it said.

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       The U.S. Embassy in Madrid didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.