ON A SEPTEMBER evening in London in 1978, Georgi Markov, prize-winning Bulgarian author and BBC broadcaster, felt a stinging pain in his thigh as he mingled with rush-hour commuters waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge.

A heavily built man in the queue momentarily dropped an umbrella, mumbled “sorry” and quickly crossed the road to hail a taxi.

An exile from the communist regime of Todor Zhivkov, the Bulgarian dictator, Markov, 49, had been aware of the danger he was in. An anonymous caller had told him he would be poisoned and he ate and drank only in the company of close friends.

But Markov thought little of the seemingly trivial incident and continued his journey home. He was dead in three days.

It remains one of Britain’s most famous unsolved murders — made all the more notorious by the James Bond nature of the killing. The murder weapon was an umbrella, partly developed by the Soviet KGB, which fired a pellet the size of a pinhead, containing the poison ricin.

Last week, in a serialisation containing leaks of secret service files in the Bulgarian daily newspaper, Dnevnik, the identity of Markov’s killer was finally revealed.

He was named as Francesco Giullino, a Dane of Italian origin who travelled Europe in a caravan pretending to be an antiques salesman: in fact, he was a Bulgarian secret agent.

The documents, uncovered during six years of research by Hristo Hristov, a Sofia-based investigative journalist, reveal how the Communist-era Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS), the Bulgarian equivalent of the KGB, had ordered Giullino to “neutralise” Markov.

It was one of a series of political assassinations authorised by Zhivkov — who was such a hardliner that he once proposed that Bulgaria should merge with the Soviet Union.

Giullino, who was born in Bari in 1946, was originally recruited by the DS in 1970. Caught smuggling drugs and currency on the Bulgarian border, he was “turned” by the agency, which used him to spy on foreigners in Bulgaria before deploying him abroad — first in Denmark, and later in Belgium, Italy and Turkey.

He used a variety of covers, from the owner of a picture-framing business to an itinerant antiques salesman, complete with an Austrian-registered caravan.

His instructions to murder Markov came from General Stoyan Savov, the deputy interior minister with special responsibility for state security.

Markov was given the name “skitnik” (tramp) by the DS. He had angered the Bulgarian regime with his radio broadcasts made on the BBC, where he worked, and for Radio Free Europe.

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