Did Bulgarian agents kill Georgiwith apoisoned umbrella ?
Thetale of Sergei Skripal, the Russian double agent poisoned earlier this year along with his daughter
Yulia, has gripped us for months. Although everything points to Russian involvement, we may never know the full facts – but this kind of thing happening on British streets is far from unusual. Forty years ago, on September 7, 1978, a man named Georgi Markov who suffered a similar fate – except that he died. It’s thought he was killed by a poison pellet, fired into his leg from an umbrella, with Bulgaria’s Secret Service the likely culprits. The attack took place as he walked over Waterloo Bridge in central London. Sofia-born Markov felt a sharp pain, like a bite or sting, and noticed a man pick up an umbrella and hurry into a taxi. At the BBC World offices, where Markov worked, he found a small red pimple beside the painful area. He developed a fever that night and was dead four days later. Then there was the case of Aleksandr Litvinenko, former Russian secret service man and defector, killed by radiation poisoning in 2006 at just 43. Unlike him, Markov didn’t have a background in espionage or state security matters, but he had been a dissident writer. The Truth That Killed, perhaps his most famous work, described the agonies of life in a totalitarian regime. In the 1970s he broadcast on Radio Free Europe, criticising the Communist world and Bulgaria’s leaders. Born in 1929, he got out of Bulgaria and headed to Italy in 1969, living with his brother. At first he hoped that the authorities at home would begin to look more kindly on him, but in 1971 they refused to extend his passport any further and he opted to remain in the West. Markov moved to London and got work with the BBC. His country sentenced him to six years and six months in prison if he ever came back. He lost his membership of the Union of Bulgaria Writers, and his works were removed from bookshops in Bulgaria. It would be 1989 before it was acceptable to mention his name again in his own country. Days before his death, there had been an attempt to murder another Bulgarian dissident in Paris with the same kind of lethal pellet used to kill Markov. Later, KGB defectors claimed that Russian spies had arranged his killing. Though no one has been brought to justice, many believe Markov’s assassin was Francesco Giullino, who is still at large and travels freely around Europe.