Word: markovic
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...first a post-mortem study yielded no poison. But what doctors did find under Markov's skin was a tiny platinum-iridium pellet, 1.7 mm in diameter, with two holes, each a mere .4 mm wide, drilled in at right angles. The holes could have contained a toxic substance, either bacterial or chemical?quite possibly not traceable...
When the discovery of the pellet was made public, Vladimir Kostov, another Bulgarian defector and a friend of Markov's, reported a similar incident in Paris. Three weeks earlier as he left the Etoile Metro station, he too had felt a stinging pain. He was ill for a few days, but did not report the incident to the police. When he did so, doctors found a pellet, identical to the one in Markov's thigh, buried in Rostov's back...
...Scotland Yard pushed its investigation of the London deaths, suspicion centered on Bulgaria's security service. Both Markov and Kostov had been well-known intellectuals in Bulgaria, with friends in the Politburo. Before defecting in 1969, Markov had won national acclaim as a writer and TV commentator. One of his later plays, The Assassins, dealt with a plot to kill a general in a police state. His defection, and his subsequent BBC and Radio Free Europe broadcasts, had been an embarrassment to the Sofia government and triggered a shake-up in its propaganda establishment. The 1977 defection of Kostov, formerly...
There was another reason to suspect Sofia. If Markov had in fact been jabbed by a poison-tipped or poison-firing umbrella?or had been shot with a pellet gun by a man holding an umbrella?only a security service would probably have such sophisticated gadgetry at hand. Today's secret agents and hit men have access to numerous James Bondian devices that can make murder look like natural death ?poison delivered by aerosol spray, tiny darts fired from pens or cigarette boxes. In the late '50s a KGB agent killed two Ukrainian exile leaders in Germany by squirting...
During the past year, Bulgaria's President Todor Zhivkov has been trying to improve relations with the West. Bulgaria claims that Markov and Simeonov were liquidated by Western intelligence services seeking to besmirch the country's image. To lend credence to that pitch, the regime offered to help British authorities dealing with the case. It was an offer the British just might be able to refuse...