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#london
2 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.
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