Georgi Markov was assassinated on a London street via a micro-engineered pellet that might have contained ricin. Contemporary newspaper accounts claimed that he had been shot in the leg with a pellet fired from an umbrella wielded by someone associated with the Bulgarian Secret Service. Annabel Markov recalled her husband's view about the umbrella, telling the BBC's Panorama programme in April, 1979: “He felt a jab in his thigh. He looked around and there was a man behind him who’d apologized and dropped an umbrella. I got the impression as he told the story that the jab hadn’t been inflicted by the umbrella but that the man had dropped the umbrella as cover to hide his face.” Subsequent investigations have discounted the theory that a pellet had been fired from an umbrella as being unlikely. It has been speculated that the Bulgarian Secret Service asked the KGB for help.