Autopsy shows John McAfee died by suicide in Spanish prison cell, newspaper reports

FILE PHOTO: John McAfee, co-founder of McAfee Crypto Team and CEO of Luxcore and founder of McAfee Antivirus, speaks at the Malta Blockchain Summit in St Julian's

MADRID (Reuters) -The official autopsy on the body of John McAfee showed that he died by suicide in the Spanish prison cell where he was awaiting extradition to the United States, El Pais newspaper said on Monday, citing unidentified sources close to the proceedings.

A spokesperson for Catalonia's court system, which is in charge of the autopsy, did not have any information on the report.

Prison wardens found the body of software mogul McAfee hanging in his cell on Wednesday in what appeared to be a suicide, his lawyer Javier Villalba said last week.

He said on Friday that McAfee's widow Janice asked him to request a second, independent autopsy once the results of the first were released.

Janice McAfee has said she does not believe her husband was suicidal and has blamed U.S. authorities for his death.

British-born McAfee, who launched the world's first commercial anti-virus software in 1987, was detained last October at the Barcelona airport. He had lived for years on the run from U.S. authorities, some of that time aboard a megayacht.

He was indicted in the U.S. state of Tennessee on tax evasion charges and was charged in a cryptocurrency fraud case in New York.

(Reporting by Inti Landauro and Joan Faus; Editing by Nathan Allen and Bill Berkrot)