Bulgarian drop murder probe into poison umbrella killing

An investigation into the murder of a Bulgarian defector in London with a poisoned umbrella has been closed, Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor says.

He says that 35 years after one of the most notorious killings of the Cold War, the case has reached the statute of limitations.

Georgi Markov, a journalist and government critic who fled Bulgaria and settled in the UK, was jabbed in the thigh with an umbrella tip on Sepember 7, 1978 as he waited for a bus at London’s Waterloo Bridge. He had been injected with a tiny pellet containing the poison ricin and developed a fever, dying four days later.

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Suspicion fell on the Bulgarian secret police, but no one has been arrested or charged in the case.

Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov said his office was ready to provide legal assistance to British authorities. There is no statute of limitations on murder in the UK.

Outraged critics say the authorities have dragged their feet on evidence the KGB and Bulgarian secret police killed him.

Markov was a journalist and harsh critic of his country’s communist regime in reports for the BBC and Radio Free Europe when he was killed.

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The fatal pellet is one of the artifacts in a macabre crime museum – closed to the public – inside Scotland Yard headquarters, alongside letters from Jack the Ripper and other mementoes.

Bulgaria was the most loyal Soviet ally under decades of Communist rule. Post-Communist leaders had vowed to clear the Markov case, but as with trials of former communist leaders, police officers and labour camp guards, little has really happened.

In closing the case, “Bulgaria and its prosecution are admitting to being either powerless or lacking the will to reveal one of the most horrific crimes of the communist regime – murder over speech, not action,” prominent columnist Petya Vladimirova wrote on Thursday.

Suspicions that Bulgarians were involved in the killing grew after Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB agent, said in 1992 that Bulgaria asked Moscow for help to kill him.

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The next year, Danish authorities charged a Dane of Italian origin, Francesco Guillino, with killing Markov. Guillino, who reportedly had worked for the Bulgarian secret services since 1972. but he denied wrongdoing. He was freed while Danish police awaited further evidence from Bulgaria that never came.

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