Dissident's Assassination Haunts Bulgaria After 40 Years

On September 7, 1978, the Bulgarian journalist, playwright and dissident from the regime of the People's Republic of Bulgaria, Georgi Markov, was poisoned with a ricin-filled pellet shot from a modified umbrella while crossing Waterloo Bridge in London. Four days later, he died.

Forty years on, as Britain remains baffled by the poisoning of exchanged spy Sergey Skripal in Salisbury, allegedly by Russian agents, the Markov case also remains open.

The details of his assassination are shrouded in mystery and the complicated legacy he left still confuses and divides Bulgarian society.

Markov, an industrial chemist by training and teacher by vocation, started working on his first literary attempts at the age of 19, while undergoing tuberculosis treatment.

Initially, his works were acclaimed by the Bulgarian Writers' Union and he even got close to Communist leader Todor Zhivkov, interviewing him on several occasions and later publishing summaries of their conversations while in exile.

He even contributed to the script of the propaganda partisan epic TV series, Every Kilometer.

With time, however, his works were deemed too bold by the censors and they imposed a number of bans on them.

Initially, he took shelter at his brother's home in Bologna, Italy, in 1969, ultimately moving to the UK in 1971.

He learned English and joined the BBC World Service, later contributing to Deutsche Welle and Radio Free Europe as well.

Markov produced a number of award-winning plays and novels during his years in the UK, but the most important - that supposedly led to his demise - was the Zadochni Reportazhi, or Reports In Absentia, one of the few in-depth analyses of social and political life in...