Georgi Markov, Bulgarian author and playwright (b. 1929)
Georgi Ivanov Markov (Bulgarian: Георги Иванов Марков [ɡɛˈɔrɡi ˈmarkof]; 1 March 1929 – 11 September 1978) was a Bulgarian dissident writer. He originally worked as a novelist, screenwriter and playwright in his native country, the People's Republic of Bulgaria, until his defection in 1978. After relocating to London, he worked as a broadcaster and journalist for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe and West Germany's Deutsche Welle. Markov used such forums to conduct a campaign of sarcastic criticism against the incumbent Bulgarian regime, which, according to his wife at the time he died, eventually became "vitriolic" and included "really smearing mud on the people in the inner circles."Markov was assassinated on a London street via a micro-engineered pellet that might have contained ricin. Contemporary newspaper accounts claimed that he had been shot in the leg with a pellet fired from an umbrella wielded by someone associated with the Bulgarian Secret Service. Annabel Markov recalled her husband's view about the umbrella, telling the BBC's Panorama programme, in April 1979, "He felt a jab in his thigh. He looked around and there was a man behind him who’d apologized and dropped an umbrella. I got the impression as he told the story that the jab hadn’t been inflicted by the umbrella but that the man had dropped the umbrella as cover to hide his face." Subsequent investigations have discounted the theory that a pellet had been fired from an umbrella as being unlikely. It has been speculated that the Bulgarian Secret Service asked the KGB for help.