KGB man held by police seeks redress
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Your support makes all the difference.A FORMER Soviet intelligence general yesterday said he may take legal action against a British newspaper that claimed he had 'handled' the execution in London of a Bulgarian dissident.
Oleg Kalugin, a former head of the KGB's foreign counter-intelligence department in Moscow, was arrested last week as he arrived at Heathrow airport to take part in a BBC programme on MI6. He was questioned for more than eight hours by Special Branch. Mr Kalugin said he would also be seeking an apology from the police for 'this gruesome affair'. He branded his treatment in Britain 'unorthodox hospitality'.
Mr Kalugin was questioned over the contents of an article in the Mail on Sunday in April this year. During an interview with the newspaper, Mr Kalugin is alleged to have told of an order given in 1978 by the then head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. The interview - surrounding a Bulgarian request to the KGB for assistance in the killing of Georgi Markov - quotes Mr Andropov giving the order: 'Kalugin, you take charge of this, you do it.'
Yesterday, speaking for the first time since learning he would not be facing any charges in connection with the killing of Mr Markov, Mr Kalugin denied any involvement in the death of the dissident Bulgarian playwright.
During police interrogation, Mr Kalugin said Special Branch had played him a tape-recording of the Mail on Sunday interview. On the Andropov order, he claimed: 'There is no such quotation on the tape.'
Scotland Yard said it had consulted the Crown Prosecution Service and it had decided there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. 'The investigation into the death of Mr Markov continues with vigour and with the co-operation of the Bulgarian authorities and other European police agencies,' a spokeswoman said.
Mr Markov, a writer working for the BBC World Service, died in 1978 after a poison pellet was fired into his thigh from a device hidden in an umbrella as he was walking over Waterloo Bridge.
Jonathan Holborow, the editor of the Mail on Sunday, said his newspaper would vigorously contest any legal action. 'The Mail on Sunday's account of his story last April is accurate and the paper stands by it. I fear General Kalugin is putting a KGB interpretation on the contents of the recorded interview with him.'
(Photograph omitted)
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