Francesco Gullino (or Giullino) (31 May 1945 – 15 August 2021) was a Dane of Italian origin who was named in June 2005 by ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

'' as the prime suspect in the 1978 "

Bulgarian umbrella A Bulgarian umbrella is an umbrella with a hidden pneumatic mechanism which injects a small poisonous pellet containing ricin. It has a hollowed stalk in which the pellet neatly sits. Such an umbrella was used in and named for the assassinatio ...

" murder of Bulgarian dissident

Georgi Markov Georgi Ivanov Markov ( bg, Георги Иванов Марков ; 1 March 1929 – 11 September 1978) was a Bulgarian dissident writer. He originally worked as a novelist, screenwriter and playwright in his native country, the People's Repub ...

. He was born in

Bra, Piedmont Bra (, ) is a town and ''comune'' in the province of Cuneo in the northwest Italian region of Piedmont. It is situated southeast of Turin and northeast of Cuneo in the area known as Roero. Bra is the birthplace of the feminist philosopher Ad ...

, Italy and was known by the code name "Piccadilly". According to Bulgarian journalist Hristo Hristov, Gullino was an occasional smuggler arrested twice in Bulgaria and given the choice of going to prison or becoming a secret agent in the West. Based in

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...

with a cover as an art dealer, Gullino was supposedly active until 1990 and received two Bulgarian state medals “for services to security and public order”. He was briefly detained in 1993 and questioned by the British and Danish police in Copenhagen and, according to Hristov, then dropped out of sight. Although Gullino admitted to having been in London when Markov was murdered, he always denied having been involved in any way. A British documentary, ''The Umbrella Assassin'' (2006), interviewed people connected with the case in Bulgaria, Britain and the United States, and revealed that Gullino was alive and well. In March 2023 the

Danish Broadcasting Corporation DR (), officially the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in English, is a Danish public-service radio and television broadcasting company. Founded in 1925 as a public-service organization, it is Denmark's oldest and largest electronic media enter ...

(DR) published a three-part documentary series about the life of Gullino and his espionage activities. The series brought special attention to an interrogation between Gullino and Scotland Yard detectives Christopher Bird and David Kemp that took place in 1993. In the interrogation Gullino admits to a relationship with the Bulgarian State. The team behind the series found and interviewed Gullino in June 2021. In the interview Gullino denies all the allegations put forth against him. Shortly after Gullino was confronted, he was found dead in his apartment in

Wels Wels (; Central Bavarian: ''Wös'') is a city in Upper Austria, on the Traun River near Linz. It is the county seat of Wels-Land, and with a population of approximately 60,000, the eighth largest city in Austria. Geography Wels is in the H ...

in Upper Austria in August 2021.

References

Citations

Other sources

* *Brunwasser, Matthew (2008)
“A Book Peels Back Some Layers of a Cold War Mystery”
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', 10 September 2008. * 1945 births 2021 deaths Italian emigrants to Denmark People from Bra, Piedmont {{Crime-bio-stub