From arsenic to zyankali: these are the most fatal poisons in the world

A Thursday in September 1978. Georgi Markow walks on the Waterloo Bridge on the way to work. The journalist is jostled at a bus stop. On the same evening, the 49-year-old ends up in the emergency room, four days later he is dead. Even before he loses consciousness, he is certain that agents of the Soviet secret service have poisoned him.

“He sighed and laughed and said: I was poisoned by the KGB and will die, they can no longer do anything,” recalls Markow’s doctor decades later in the documentary “silence”. Before Markow died of the consequences of poisoning, he told the stranger with the umbrella with which he had collided and reported on a stab in his leg.

Georgi Markow was not an ordinary passerby. The writer and dissident had kicked people in his former homeland in Bulgaria. Even later as a journalist in London, he vehemently denounced the communist regime in Sofia and especially the head of state Todor Schiwkow. September 7th, the day of the attack, was also Schwikov’s birthday.

The autopsy should later show that Markow had actually been the victim of an attack. A tiny platinum balls with less than two millimeters in diameter were found in his leg, in which traces of the high -toxic plant poison were found. The poison was probably injected over the tip of the umbrella for the journalist. The case went into criminal history as an umbrella attack.

Ricin is one of the most fatal poisons in the world – but it is by no means the only one. In the photo gallery we present ten naturally occurring and two man -made toxins that you should know and avoid.