The Umbrella Murder

Poison is a popular means of killing when it comes to discreetly getting rid of someone. This method of killing is therefore particularly popular among secret agents. A prime example of this was the murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, which went down in criminal history as the so-called umbrella murder. On September 7, 1978, the 67th birthday of the inconvenient dissident Georgi Markov, he was waiting for the bus at the Waterloo Bridge stop in London. Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his right calf and saw a man with an umbrella walking away from him at a brisk pace. Four days later, Markov was dead. His heart had stopped beating. During the subsequent autopsy, forensic pathologists found a tiny platinum ball with a diameter of 1.7 millimeters, smaller than a pinhead, in his right thigh. This ball had tiny openings on both sides, which had injected the poison ricin into his body. Ricin is a highly effective poison. Once it enters the body, it unleashes its toxic effect. It destroys the protein factories in the cells, thereby radically ending the basic life processes. The openings in the pellet were sealed with icing, which dissolved due to body heat, releasing the poison. The Bulgarian head of state Todor Zhivkov turned out to be the instigator of the insidious poison attack on Markov. Georgi Markov was an avowed communist and successful author in Bulgaria who had fallen out with the ruling regime there and fled into exile in Italy in 1969. He then moved to London, where, as a dissident and journalist, he mocked the communist dictator Todor Zhivkov in his column “Reportage on Bulgaria from Afar” from 1972 onwards. Georgi Markov believed he was safe from the Bulgarian regime in London. But Todor Zhivkov pulled out all the stops to destroy Markov. He asked the Russian secret service, the KGB, for help, and they eliminated Markov in an inconspicuous manner, which they did with great success. Markov had been poisoned so cleverly that even when he was admitted to the emergency room with a high fever and blood pressure shortly before falling into a coma, he said with a smile, “I have been poisoned by the KGB and I am going to die,” which he did four days later. The Russian secret service had really done a thorough job here.

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