Georgi Markow (writer)

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Georgi Ivanov Markov ( Bulgarian Георги Иванов Марков ; born March 1, 1929 in Sofia , † September 11, 1978 in London ) was a Bulgarian writer and playwright and dissident who was murdered by the Bulgarian secret police in a sensational umbrella attack .

Life

Markov emigrated from Bulgaria to Italy in 1969 , where his brother lived, and later worked as a journalist in London. He publicly criticized the communist leadership in his home country; in the Bulgarian programs of the BBC, Deutsche Welle and Radio Free Europe he mocked the Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov .

He was the victim of the umbrella attack on September 7, 1978 on Waterloo Bridge in London , in which a man stabbed him in the right calf with an umbrella with an impregnated small ball that was at the tip of the umbrella. The sphere made of a platinum - iridium alloy had a diameter of 1.52 mm and was prepared with about 200  micrograms of the highly toxic substance ricin . Markov died four days later with fever and hypotension in heart failure .

An agent of the Bulgarian secret service by the name of Francesco Giullino (alias Piccadilly ) was blamed as the perpetrator . The former major general of the Soviet secret service Oleg Kalugin confirmed in an interview with the Bulgarian broadcaster Darik Radio that this attack was carried out on the orders of Todor Zhivkov. The KGB supplied the poison and the capsule.

Posthumously , Markov was awarded the highest Bulgarian order Stara Planina in 2000. On November 11, 2014, a statue of him was inaugurated in the center of Sofia.

Others

The former head of the secret service, Vladimir Todorov, destroyed six Markov files in 1990 after the revolution against the communist dictatorship ; he later claimed that these records had no operational or historical significance. Todorow was imprisoned for 16 months in 1992; an important witness committed suicide shortly before he was questioned.

Fonts

literature

Web links

Footnotes

  1. a b Christoph Gunkel / One day March 17, 2018: "I will die, you can no longer do anything"
  2. ^ Ricin and the umbrella murder. on: CNN.com , October 23, 2003. Retrieved October 23, 2016.
  3. L. Rózsa, K. Nixdorff: Biological Weapons in Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Countries. In: M. Wheelis, L. Rózsa, M. Dando (Eds.): Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945. Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 157–168.
  4. Sweet ball . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1992, pp. 168-170 ( online ).
  5. Jack Hamilton and Tom Walker: Dane named as umbrella killer - Times Online. In: The Sunday Times . June 5, 2005, archived from the original on April 20, 2011 ; accessed on April 20, 2011 (English).
  6. Klaus Brill : Gift directly from the dictator. ( Memento of the original from March 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sueddeutsche.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. August 2, 2008.
  7. ^ Georgi Markov: Bulgaria inaugurates statue to dissident. BBC News, August 27, 2020, accessed August 27, 2020 .
  8. ^ Judith Leister: Notes from a mausoleum. In: NZZ . October 30, 2014.