Georgieu Ivanov Markov was a writer from Bulgaria and a staunch anti-communist campaigner. He came to England in 1971 after having defected to the west in 1969. Since then, he worked for the Bbc World Service. He broadcasted every week to Bulgaria on political and cultural issues. He never tried to hide his contempt for the regime in his native Bulgaria. He made some enemies in high places in the Bulgarian hierarchy.
On September 7th 1978, he was due to work in the evening in Aldwych at the Bbc studios. He drove to the South Bank from his home in Clapham at about 2:30 pm. He left his car on a meter there because of the difficulty in parking in Central London at that time of day. He walked about a kilometre over Waterloo Bridge to get to his work place.
Microscope
At 6:30 pm, he followed his usual habit of going to his car to feed the meter. It was on his way there on this single day that he walked past a crowded bus stop. He was suddenly taken aback by a sharp stinging feeling in the back of his right thigh. He suddenly turned nearby to see a man with an umbrella. The man apologised in a foreign accent, then hurriedly waved down a taxi and climbed in. The taxi sped off into the rush hour traffic before Markov had the occasion to confront him.
When he returned to his office later, he told Teo Lirkoff, his colleague, about what happened. Kirkoff noticed a small speck of blood at the back of Markov's Jeans. Markov took them off and Lirkoff pointed out a slightly bigger red spot on the back of Markov's leg. Markov, although startled, didn't think much more about it and dismissed it as an accident. He got on with his work. After reading the news at 9:30 pm, he returned to his Clapham home about an hour later. He told his wife about what happened and showed her the mark on his leg, but neither of them took it very seriously.
The next morning, Markov woke feeling extremely feverish and had a bout of vomiting. His throat felt tight and he was seeing it very difficult to speak. He was taken to St James's hospital not far away in Balham some hours later. Dr Bernard Riley examined him and discovered he had a rapid pulse and swollen lymph glands. His wife Annabel began to hear alarm bells and suspected a potential relationship to yesterday's incident with the umbrella. She tried to tell the doctors about what happened, but they didn't take her seriously and dismissed her suspicions. They did an X-ray on his thigh, but found nothing out of the ordinary.
Later that same morning, Markov deteriorated considerably and he was transferred to arduous care. His blood pressure nose-dived and his pulse rocketed to 160 beats per minute, twice the normal rate. His body climatic characteristic plummeted and he was unable to pass water, an indication of potential kidney failure. He continuously vomited and they noticed traces of blood in his vomit. Tests showed that his white cell count was treble what it should be.
The physicians were baffled by his symptoms. Their first thoughts were that he probably had septicaemia. It was early in the morning on 11th September, 4 days after the incident, that Markov's condition became critical. Added tests showed that the conductive law of his heart was blocked and the surgeons ready to insert a pacemaker in him.
Before they had the occasion to carry out the operation, Markov went delirious and yanked out all his intravenous drips. This caused an immense shock to his law and his heart stopped not long after. Despite the doctors' desperate efforts to resuscitate him, they pronounced Markov dead about an hour later.
Forensic pathologist Dr Rufus Crompton carried out an autopsy the next day. He examined the lungs, liver lymph glands, intestines, pancreas and testicles. They all indicated that Markov had been poisoned.
Although he was extremely sceptical about Annabel Markov's suspicions about enemy agents attacking him, the small wound bothered him and he decided to cut away a section of the flesh nearby it, and a section from the same place from his other thigh. He sent the samples over to the Metropolitan Police Forensic laboratory at Lambeth.
Although the curative world dismissed Annabel's theories, the police certainly didn't. They immediately launched a full investigation into his death which was headed by Commander James Nevill of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad.
The tissue samples from Markov's thighs were taken to top-secret chemical defence preparing at Porton Down for Added examination. Doctor David Gall was one of Britain's top authorities on poisons and nerve agents and he was put in payment of the investigation at Porton Down. While examining the samples, even he practically missed the one clue to the cause of Markov's death. It was only by sheer good fortune that he didn't.
He noticed that Rufus Crompton had put in a pin for orientation purposes, which he'd pushed all the way in to give him a mark. Dr Gall tipped it with his gloved finger to check that it was what he thought it was, when it moved about an inch across the tissue, imaginable him. This was strange. He discovered it wasn't a pin head at all, but a loose piece of metal. If it had rolled off the autopsy table onto the floor, it would most likely never have been discovered. It was less than 1.5 mm in diameter. He examined it under the microscope.
It certainly wasn't what it appeared to be to the naked eye. It was a pellet that had been drilled with two tiny holes at right angles to each other. It looked a bit like a bowling ball, except with two holes instead of three. Gall and his associates examined the poison that killed Markov and sent the pellet to the police lab for more detailed examination.
They couldn't find a trace of poison in Markov's body, so they began a process of elimination. They quickly discounted viral and bacterial infections, also diphtheria and tetanus toxins. Endotoxin could have caused Markov's blood pressure to fall and white cell count to increase, but they dismissed that too because of the quantity needed to prove lethal. Most other chemical poisons were discounted also.
They came to the end that perhaps the poison was produced organically from a plant or animal. They went straight through the list of them and dismissed them one by one. They couldn't think of one that was consistent with Markov's symptoms. Finally, they found only one substance that ticked all the boxes - ricin.
It derives from the castor bean. Weight for weight, it's about 500 times more toxic than cyanide or arsenic. In the past, the Porton Down team had performed experiments on small animals with ricin. They recorded very similar symptoms that Markov suffered, but they needed to be sure.
Dr Frank Beswick from the Porton Down curative branch decided to carry out an experiment on an animal similar in bulk and anatomical buildings to a man - a pig. He injected it with a little estimate of ricin. Six hours passed before it a fever and elevating white cell count. The next day, the poor thing developed cardiac arrhythmia. Twenty-four hours after the injection was administered, it was dead. The post mortem carried out on the pig showed practically selfsame results to Markov's.
Meanwhile, over at the police lab, they were scrutinising the pellet under a scanning electron microscope. They found it to be made of an alloy 90% platinum and 10% iridium. It was harder than steel and immune to corrosion. The two holes were less than 0.35 mm in diameter. It was apparent now that this pellet was designed and made for one purpose and one purpose alone.
The pellet had to be hard enough to pass straight through clothing and human flesh without distorting. It was made of material that was biologically inert so as not to cause rejection by the body or wide-spread inflammation. It was also impenetrable by radiation, so it wouldn't show on an X-ray. They examined Markov's X-rays again and they just made out the pellet in the shadow of the femur. At first, it had been mistaken for a speck of dust on the photographic plate.
Things were starting to fall into place. The police now were in no doubt that Markov had been killed by the pellet which held only 0.2 milligrams of ricin, but that was all that was needed. What they didn't know was how it had been administered into Markov's body or who did it.
They thought about Annabella Markov's recollections, but they couldn't see much likelihood that it was jabbed into him from the point of an umbrella because of how difficult it would be. They also dismissed the thought that it could have been fired from a gun. Markov didn't hear anyone and there would have been powder burns on his jeans. It was difficult to find the point in his jeans where the pellet passed through.
The forensic branch could only think of one answer, that it had been projected by some sort of high-powered gas or compressed-air gun that had been built into the umbrella. The ask then was who did it? The police and Mi5 were sure that the Bulgarian inexpressive aid were behind it. Russia were the prominent manufacturers of the material that the pellet was made from and ricin was being intensively researched in Hungary, so it seemed positive that the killing had been carried out with their knowledge and help also.
Knowing all this was one thing, proving it was another. Diplomats at the Bulgarian embassy in London denied any knowledge of the killing. They described the police suspicions as "absurd". The man with the umbrella was never found. Constrained by polite immunity, the case was terminated by the police. There was, however, one man to whom the case was not terminated - Annabella Markov.
For the next 12 years, she campaigned for a collective enquiry into the death of her husband. After the collapse of communism in 1991, her wishes were partly satisfied. The new Bulgarian government admitted that their predecessors had been behind some assassinations of Bulgarian defectors, Markov being one of them. They promised an enquiry, then reneged on it. Markov's widow and the British authorities have since tried to persuade the Bulgarian government to recognize the assassin and hand him over for trial, but so far without success.
The Poison Pellet Murder
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