Scotland Yard Investigates Georgi Markov

In a move that is unlikely to ease UK-Russia tensions, Scotland Yard has reopened its investigation of the 1978 murder of Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov, who was famously assassinated via a poison pellet believed to have been delivered by a spy’s umbrella while walking across Waterloo Bridge in London. The Economist has a good story comparing the level of cooperation of the Bulgarian government with that of the Kremlin following the Litvinenko murder: “Bulgaria’s co-operation contrasts sharply with Russia’s intransigence over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a British citizen and vociferous critic of the Kremlin, who was poisoned in London in November 2006 by a rare radioactive element, polonium. British officials are convinced that Russia’s security service, the FSB, was involved in the murder. The prime suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, is now a celebrated Russian parliamentarian. (…) Whether or not the Soviet KGB ordered Markov’s murder, their close Bulgarian allies would certainly have shared details of such a risky operation. Bulgaria asked Russia to declassify its Markov files in 1991 but did not pursue it. If the new man in the Kremlin, Dmitry Medvedev, truly wants to thaw his country’s icy relations with Britain, he could do worse than pass on whatever the closely-guarded archives of the old KGB contain on the Markov murder.”