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John McAfee’s elaborate and rainy escape from Belize

John McAfee — tech titan, gun lover and wanted for questioning in the murder of an acquaintance — finally revealed the details of his harrowing escape from Belize into the comfy confines of neighboring Guatemala, a country that ultimately deported him to the United States.

The eccentric inventor of antivirus software was on the run from Belizean police because they wanted to question him about the November murder of one of his neighbors, Gregory Vint Faul, another American expatriate living in Belize.

McAfee, however, denied all wrong-doing and claimed that if the authorities ever caught him they would kill him.

Because he feared the police, McAfee and his 20-year-old girlfriend Samantha Vanegas “had been in hiding for a couple of weeks, living in less than desirable conditions,” while he planned an elaborate escape from Belize that he outlined on his blog the day after Christmas.

Stage one of McAfee’s plan was straight out of a spy movie: he had a look-alike, “a man I have known for over 30 years and who years ago changed his name to John McAfee” get arrested in the Mexico, one hundred miles north of Belizean border, in order to convince the Belizean police that they could stop searching for McAfee.

While the look-alike diversion was working in the north, McAfee and some of his friends piled into an SUV and followed another friend, who was driving one of McAfee’s trucks, in the opposite direction.

The idea was for the lead truck, not containing McAfee, to act as another decoy designed to trip up security checkpoints on the highway. “If they stopped the truck, I knew the checkpoint officers would be swarming all over it. Subsequent traffic would be likely to be waved through,” McAfee said.

All of McAfee’s complicated subterfuge was actually an elaborate backup plan because McAfee knew the Achilles’ heel of the Belizean police: rain.

“In Belize, no checkpoint officers will ever stop a car in the rain,” McAfee wrote in his blog entry.

So, McAfee chose a day when the forecast called for a 100% chance of rain and allegedly sailed through three highway checkpoints on the way to Punta Gorda, a small southern town on the coast of Belize.

From there, he and his friends got on a boat and made their way to Guatemala.

Unfortunately, McAfee was arrested in Guatemala shortly after arriving when some reporters he was traveling with mistakenly revealed his location, according to Wired.com.

McAfee was deported to the United States on December 12 and is now staying in Miami.