How Boris Yeltsin got Tories to block probe into umbrella assassin

Georgi Markov was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in 1978 when a man poked him with a brolly, injecting a tiny pellet containing deadly ricin toxin into his leg.

- BY TOM PETTIFOR Crime Editor

Markov, 49, a Bulgarian writer and critic of his country’s Cold War-era regime, died four days later.

British detectives suspected he was the victim of a state-sponsored murder but the investigation hit a dead end.

Now UK government files – marked “secret” and obtained by this newspaper – reveal officials called for a new probe in the 1990s to be dropped at the request of Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

John Major was the Tory PM at the time.

Scotland Yard reopened the case in 1993 following the end of the Cold War and after Italian-born spy Francesco Gullino, known as Agent Piccadilly, was identified as the prime suspect.

Around the same time ex-KGB officer Oleg Kalugin confirmed that Bulgaria’s former dictator Todor Zhivkov had ordered the hit on Markov.

Markov had described the statesman as a snob and a minor dictator in his satirical programmes on the US-run Radio Free Europe.

Kalugin said Zhikov demanded the help of the Soviet security services with the assassination. Bulgaria was aligned with the USSR at the time.

Kalugin was quizzed in London and later released without charge.

Nigel Thorpe, of the Foreign Office’s Central European department, wrote to Tory foreign secretary Douglas Hurd’s private secretary on May 25, 1994, about the Metropolitan Police’s attempts to investigate in Moscow.

Thorpe wrote: “President Yeltsin’s office has since told our ambassador that there are no relevant Russian archives, and interviews with individuals, while not ruled out, could cause political problems.

“The ambassador has advised against taking the matter further.” He noted that the chances “of early (or perhaps any) progress are slim”, adding that Hurd had said that “we are not going to get anywhere”.