Hello, and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service. It's 80 years since the World Service first went on here. Of all the historic moments connected to its home at Bush House in London, few are more dramatic than the murder of a BBC journalist by an umbrella-wielding assassin. Rebecca Kesby reports on the death of Georgie Markoff.
It's September 7th, 1978, and here on the south side of Waterloo Bridge in London, a man is waiting for a bus. He suddenly feels a sharp pain in the back of his right thigh and looks up to see a figure hurrying away holding an umbrella. The man is Georgie Markoff of Algarian dissident. He's just been poisoned and within four days he'll be dead.
4-5. He continues his short journey by bus, here to the fifth floor of Bush House, where he works for the Bulgarian section. Sretan Wietzky works for the Yugoslav section and is a close friend. When I think of it possibly, I saw him on the day he was stabbed.
But I didn't speak to him. I came here to work on the fifth floor. And that was definitely the last picture of him in my mind. In those days we all had our typists.
He was dictating and they were very happy typing, wasn't he? In fact, Georgie Markoff was beginning to feel unwell. He left work early and headed home to his wife Annabelle. Later she told reporters what happened.
He came home on Thursday night, he was perfectly OK. And by the next day he was in a critical situation. When he came home on Thursday night, what did he say about what happened to him? He told me the most extraordinary story that he'd been jabbed with an umbrella tip.
It was almost as if he didn't want to believe it himself. And I don't think he wanted to frighten me with it. But he showed me the mark that the umbrella had made. What was it like?
It was like the point of a hypodermic. On Friday evening, Markoff checked himself into the emergency departments at St. James's Hospital in South London. Judy Jr.
Dr. Bernard Riley was on the night shift. It was a fairly small casualty department with just curtained off cubicles. And I think I arrived at roughly the time the nurses were doing the handover from the late shift to the start of the night shift.
And I got the impression that they weren't taking him very seriously. And the conversation went along the lines of, oh, there's a child with a penicitis in cubicle one, a lady with a heart attack in cubicle two, and there's some nutter in cubicle three who says he's been shot by the KGB. But he was set up, his wife was there. And I got the impression that he was a little annoyed.
He already told his story to the GP. He'd already told it to the nurses. And now he was going to have to tell it to me all over again. He just went through the entire story about how he saw a chap just turn away from him, run across the road and hail a taxi and get into it.
And then he just paused. And he said to me, I'll never forget it. He said, I've been poisoned by the KGB. And there's absolutely nothing that you can do.
It was just the way he looked and the way he acted. I thought, well, I'll take you seriously and examine you and see what I can find. And when I examined him, I found that he had a very small, almost like a pimple, like lesion on the back of his right thigh, was an area of swelling, which looked as if he'd been sort of stung by a wasp or a bee or bitten by a horse fly or something. What was it that made you believe him?
Well, it was rather odd. It was the story. It was the intensity of which he told it. And he just came across as being totally honest.
Dr Riley Fone Scott and Yard had asked for special brunch. He also headed for the hospital library to try to work out what kind of poison may have been used and whether there was an antidote. I thought, well, if he's telling the truth, it isn't going to be a bacteria or a virus, because you'd run the risk of that spreading to someone else if you were looking at the things which were fairly lethal. It had to really be sort of a toxin of some sort.
And then it was a question of what was the toxin? Later, tests revealed that the poison, most likely to have killed Georgi Markov, was rising, contained in a tiny metal ball bearing, even a small amount is enough to cause toxic shock, eventually shutting down the internal organs, but leaving virtually no trace. And the victim appears to have died of natural causes. At the height of the Cold War, it was the perfect weapon to quietly dispatch an enemy.
The attack took place on the birthday of Tordor Zhivkov, the president of Communist Bulgaria. Annabel Markov said her husband knew that ever since his defection, his life was in danger. He'd made it clear in the past that if he was killed, he'd know who was behind it, what organization was behind it. Before he'd affected, he was one of the top writers in the country.
He was in a very privileged little circle. He knew things about people in Bulgaria, which very few other people knew. What sort of thing was he saying about who he was like an young man? Corruption, he was trying to expose that sort of thing.
I would say that he was a brave man in what he did, definitely. He wanted people who were getting into the truth. He was killed because he rubbed the leadership in Bulgaria the wrong way. He went up their noses with his provoking pen, yes.
Dr Riley continued to treat Giorgi Markov at St. James's hospital over the weekend, but his condition was worsening. He says Markov was a patient he would never forget. Well, it completely changed my life in that, throughout my medical training, I wanted to be a forensic pathologist.
But I just suddenly realised that I enjoyed trying to keep people alive, rather more than finding out why they died. It was a complete road to a Damascus conversion, really, where I had suddenly wanted now to work on intensive care. That was my focus and has been all my life. He certainly changed my life.
I think the thing that it taught me most of all was always believed to be patient. Eventually, Giorgi Markov died on the 11th of September 1978. Dr Riley was with him. Well, it was on the intensive care unit.
It was a Monday morning ward round. There were more senior doctors present to Renshaas, unfortunately. His heart just gave out before our eyes, and there was absolutely nothing we could do. But by this time he was sedated or on a ventilator, and he didn't suffer any pain or discomfort in any way at all.
But I remember just feeling a sense of abject failure, really, that if only I'd get on single, I must be able to do something else. And I just felt awfully sorry for his wife, and I really thought the only comfort I could say was that, well, I believed him and I did my best. I remember Giorgi Markov as a very amiable character. We were here on the same floor.
I like his bohemian lifestyle. He was fond of good food, good drinks. We went to parties together, girls, we were young. And I was his best man at the wedding.
Sleddon was at home and he received the devastating news on the phone from Bush House. I wouldn't believe. I wouldn't believe his words. It was only a few days before that I had been speaking to him.
But it was here, interview people who knew him, they interviewed me once or twice. There was somebody from Scotland Yard who was sitting in Bulgarian section for years. Everywhere old, deeply saddened, it was an absolute tragedy for us. The case of the assassination of Giorgi Markov remains open.
No one has ever been convicted or even arrested. Within a month of his death, another journalist with the Bulgarian service at Bush House would also die under suspicious circumstances and there's still no antidote available for rising. Rebecca Kespi, for details of our complete range of downloads and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com.com. .