[MUSIC]
Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian writer,
but he had become dis-satisfied with the
communist regime in Bulgaria.
And in 1971, he defected to Britain and
he'd started working for the BBC World
Service, broadcasting to Bulgaria in
Bulgarian, saying very unpleasant things
about the then Bulgarian Regime and the
then communist Bulgarian President.
These things did not make him popular back
in Sofia.
Now, one day in September 1979, he was on
his way to work and he
was standing on Waterloo Bridge when he
felt a sharp pain in one of his legs.
And he'd been poked in the leg by an
umbrella held by the man standing next to
him.
This man mumbled an apology and then
disappeared.
Well, Markov went on to work, but he
started to feel unwell.
The next day he was admitted to hospital
and on the following Monday, he died.
Well, at the autopsy the puncture wound
from this poke in the leg was found
and the tissue from that part of the leg
was sent to Porton Down, the chemical
weapons research establishment.
And in the tissue there was a very, very
tiny metallic sphere.
SEM-EDX analysis showed that its
composition was very unusual.
It was an alloy, 90% platinum, the rest
was iridium.
Not the kind of alloy you'd come across in
normal life.
This sphere was hollow.
There was a tiny hollow space inside, and
they estimated this was big enough
for about 2 milligrams of poison, though
there was no detectable poison inside it
anymore.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
It was deduced that the poison most likely
to have been used
inside that metal sphere was a complex
polypeptide called
ricin, and this can be isolated from the
castor oil plant.
Rather scarily, the castor oil plant is
very, very common.
It's quite an attractive plant, and many
people might find it growing in their
garden.
The umbrella was, of course, not a real
umbrella.
It was, in fact, a pellet gun disguised as
an umbrella and probably made by the KGB.
This technique had in fact been used the
previous year on another Bulgarian
dissident called Kostov.
The difference was that whereas Markov
died
from the ricin poisoning, Kostov had
survived,
and it's believed this is simply because
of the way they were stabbed.
The pellet injected into Markov came very
close to a blood vessel and therefore
the ricin was absorbed very fast, reaching
a high and lethal concentration.
The pellet injected into Kostov probably
went into muscle tissue and therefore
there was a very slow absorbance of the
ricin into the bloodstream.
Well, was Markov really murdered by
Bulgarian Secret Services?
It seems very likely that this was the
case,
though many of the records of the
Bulgarian Secret
Service disappeared when, with the fall of
the communist
regime and many important people in that
regime committed
suicide, so they can never tell us the
truth.

