Assassinated by a poison tipped umbrella waiting for a London bus! This is what happened on September 7, 1978 to Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident living in London. Markov was assassinated on a London street via a micro-engineered pellet that reportedly contained ricin. Contemporary newspaper accounts reported that he had been stabbed in the leg with an umbrella delivering a poisoned pellet, wielded by someone associated with the Bulgarian Secret Service. "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." It was reported after the fall of the Soviet Union that the Soviet KGB had assisted the Bulgarian Secret Service.On 7 September 1978, Markov walked across Waterloo Bridge spanning the River Thames and waited to take a bus to his job at the BBC. While at the bus stop, he reported feeling a slight sharp pain, as if from an insect bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. When he arrived at work at the BBC World Service offices, he noticed a small red pimple had formed at the site of the sting he had felt earlier and the pain had not lessened or stopped. He told at least one of his colleagues at the BBC, Theo Lirkov, about this incident. That evening, he developed a fever and was admitted to St James' Hospital in Balham, where he died four days later, on 11 September 1978, at the age of 49. Ten days before the assassination, an attempt was made to kill another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov, in the same manner as Markov, in a Paris Métro station. #da#davidharryh#thelondonspyi#ricins#assassins#assassinationm#umbrellai#dissidente#georgimarkova#waterloobridges#espionagee#secretagento#Londonguideo#tourguidep#spy - @the_london_spy