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#assassination
8 articles
The Umbrella Murder: The Poisoning of Georgi Markov
On the afternoon of 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in London, on his way to his job at the BBC World Service, when he felt a sudden sharp sting in the back of his right thigh. Turning, he saw a man behind him bending to pick up a dropped umbrella; the man apologised in a foreign accent, hurried across the road, and got into a taxi. Markov thought little of it at first, but by that evening he had developed a high fever, and over the next three days his condition collapsed catastrophically. He died on 11 September, aged forty-nine. A post-mortem examination found, embedded in his thigh, a tiny metal pellet no larger than a pinhead, drilled with minuscule cavities that had held a dose of ricin — one of the deadliest toxins known, and one for which there is no antidote. Markov had been assassinated in broad daylight on a London street, murdered for the crime of broadcasting the truth about the communist regime in his homeland. The method — a poison pellet delivered, it is believed, by a specially engineered umbrella — became one of the most infamous images of Cold War espionage, and the killing itself one of its clearest examples of a state reaching across borders to silence a dissident. This is the story of the umbrella murder.
The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko: Polonium in a London Teapot
On 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of Russia's FSB security service who had defected to Britain and become one of the Kremlin's most outspoken critics, met two Russian contacts for tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London's Mayfair. Within hours he was violently ill; over the following three weeks he wasted away in a hospital bed, his hair falling out, his organs failing, as doctors struggled to identify what was killing him. Only as he lay dying did they discover the cause: polonium-210, a rare and extraordinarily radioactive isotope, which had been slipped into his teapot. He died on 23 November 2006, aged forty-four, but not before dictating a statement accusing President Vladimir Putin directly of ordering his murder. The polonium had left a faint radioactive trail across London — through the hotel, restaurants, offices, and aircraft — which investigators followed to two Russian men, and, they concluded, back to the Russian state itself. A decade later, a British public inquiry found that Litvinenko had been killed in an operation carried out by the FSB and 'probably approved' by Putin himself. It was an assassination by radiation on the streets of a Western capital, and one of the most brazen acts of state murder of the twenty-first century. This is the story of the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: The Shot at the Lorraine Motel
At one minute past six on the evening of 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out onto the balcony of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He had come to the city to support striking Black sanitation workers, and the night before had delivered, as if in premonition, his haunting 'I've Been to the Mountaintop' speech. Now, standing at the railing chatting with colleagues in the parking lot below, he was struck in the face by a single high-powered rifle bullet fired from a rooming house across the street. He fell mortally wounded and was pronounced dead an hour later. He was thirty-nine years old, and with his death the United States lost the most eloquent, disciplined, and morally commanding leader its long struggle for racial justice had produced. A petty criminal and escaped convict named James Earl Ray was identified as the assassin, captured after a two-month international manhunt, and convicted on his own guilty plea. Yet within days Ray recanted, insisting he had been a pawn in a larger plot; he spent the rest of his life seeking the trial he never got; and King's own widow and children came to believe he was not the lone gunman — or not the gunman at all. Set against the documented fact that the FBI had waged a vicious secret campaign to destroy King, the questions have proved impossible to lay fully to rest. This is the story of the assassination at the Lorraine Motel, and of the doubts that outlived the man convicted of it.
The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand: The Shot That Lit the World
On the morning of 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, rode through the streets of Sarajevo with his wife Sophie in an open car. Waiting along the route were members of a group of young Bosnian Serb nationalists, armed and trained by a secret society with links to Serbian military intelligence, who had come to kill him. The first attempt failed: a bomb was thrown and bounced away, wounding others but not the Archduke. It should have ended there. But a series of small mistakes — a change of route not passed to the drivers, a wrong turn, a car stopped to reverse at the worst possible spot — brought Franz Ferdinand's stalled vehicle to a halt a few feet from one of the assassins, Gavrilo Princip, who had given up and drifted away from his post. He stepped forward and fired twice. The Archduke and his wife were dead within minutes. What followed was not merely a tragedy for two people and their orphaned children but a catastrophe for the world: over the next six weeks, a tangle of alliances, ultimatums, and mobilisations turned a political murder in the Balkans into the First World War, which would kill some twenty million people and destroy four empires. This is the story of the shot that lit the world — and of how very nearly it was never fired.
The Assassination of Malcolm X: The Wrong Men and the Long Wait for Justice
On the afternoon of 21 February 1965, Malcolm X stepped to the podium of the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan to address a few hundred followers of his newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity. He had barely begun to speak when a disturbance broke out in the crowd, and in the confusion gunmen rushed the stage and opened fire, striking him more than a dozen times. He was pronounced dead within the hour; he was thirty-nine years old, and his pregnant wife and children were in the room. The men who killed him were members of the Nation of Islam, the movement he had once served as its most electrifying voice and had, in the last year of his life, publicly broken with. That much has never been in serious doubt. But the case that followed was a travesty: of the three men convicted of the murder, two were almost certainly innocent, wrongly imprisoned for a crime they did not commit, while some of the real killers were never charged. It would take more than half a century — until November 2021 — for the state of New York to admit the injustice, exonerate the two surviving wrongly convicted men, and confront the evidence that the FBI and the police had concealed. This is the story of the assassination of Malcolm X, of the wrong men who paid for it, and of the long, unfinished wait for the truth.
The Assassination of Trotsky: Stalin's Ice Axe in Mexico
Leon Trotsky had once stood at the very summit of the Russian Revolution — the organiser of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, the founder and commander of the Red Army, the man many expected to succeed Lenin. Instead he lost the struggle for power to Joseph Stalin, and became the most hunted political exile on Earth. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, he wandered from Turkey to France to Norway before Mexico granted him asylum, and everywhere he went the long arm of Stalin's secret police followed. One by one, his collaborators, his secretaries, and his own children were killed or died in suspicious circumstances, until Trotsky, living behind the high walls and watchtowers of a fortress-like house in the Coyoacán district of Mexico City, was almost the last of his circle left alive. On 20 August 1940, a young man he believed to be a devoted follower came to show him an article. As Trotsky bent over his desk to read it, the visitor drew a mountaineer's ice axe from beneath his coat and drove it into the old revolutionary's skull. Trotsky died the next day. The killer was an agent of Stalin's NKVD, and the operation had been approved at the very top of the Soviet state. Unlike so many political murders shrouded in doubt, this one is documented down to its code name. This is the story of how Stalin finally killed Leon Trotsky.
Project Coast and the Apartheid State's Secret Chemistry of Death
In the last decade of apartheid, behind a screen of front companies and military secrecy, the South African state ran a programme to turn medicine and chemistry into instruments of murder. It was called Project Coast, it was established in 1981, and it was directed by a brilliant young cardiologist named Wouter Basson, whom the press would later christen 'Dr Death.' Under his direction, government scientists in laboratories outside Pretoria cultured anthrax, cholera, and botulinum; manufactured poisons designed to kill quietly and untraceably; produced tons of Ecstasy and Mandrax; and pursued a research goal that sounds like the plot of a horror film but appears in the sworn record of South Africa's own Truth and Reconciliation Commission: a vaccine that would make Black South Africans infertile without their knowledge, to be administered covertly to suppress the Black birth rate. Apartheid opponents were poisoned, their clothing impregnated with toxins; according to testimony, captured guerrillas were sedated and dropped from aircraft into the sea. Much of this came to light only after apartheid ended, when Basson was arrested, his steel trunks of documents were opened, and the TRC convened special hearings on chemical and biological warfare. And then, in one of the most contested verdicts in South African legal history, Basson was tried on dozens of charges and acquitted of every one. This article sets out what Project Coast was, what it did, what it aspired to and never achieved, and why so much of it ended not in a reckoning but in an acquittal.
The Olof Palme Assassination
At 11:21 p.m. on Friday, February 28, 1986, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, was shot in the back at point-blank range on Sveavägen, Stockholm, while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet. Lisbet Palme was grazed by a second shot. Olof Palme was 59 years old. He had been the Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982. He had no bodyguards that night. The killer ran east up Tunnelgatan and disappeared. He has never been positively identified. Sweden's Palme Commission and its successor police investigation ran for 34 years. On June 10, 2020, Chief Prosecutor Krister Petersson publicly named the most likely perpetrator — a Swedish graphic designer named Stig Engström, the so-called "Skandiamannen" — and simultaneously closed the case because Engström had died in 2000 and could not be tried. The 40-year-old investigation produced 22 binders of investigative material, dozens of failed theories, one wrongful conviction, and no court ruling. It is the largest unsolved political assassination in modern European history.
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