Assassinations News Stories

Excerpts of Key Assassinations News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on political assassinations from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Chile's Communist Party wants a formal investigation into the death of the country's revered poet Pablo Neruda, who officially died of cancer only days after the 1973 coup toppled his close friend, President Salvador Allende. Several witnesses have raised doubts about his death recently, including Neruda's driver, who says he was poisoned by government agents. Neruda died at the age of 69 on Sept. 23, 1973, 12 days after the coup. He had just published a withering criticism of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship that eulogized Allende and accused Chile's soldiers of having betrayed their country. He'd won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years earlier, giving him great international prestige. Neruda died, officially of prostate cancer, in the same clinic where former President Eduardo Frei was allegedly poisoned in 1981 by six people, including several Pinochet agents, who were charged last year in connection with his death. Now Neruda's driver, Manuel Araya, has alleged that Pinochet agents injected deadly poison into Neruda's stomach. [There are] similar doubts about the deaths of Allende, Frei and Allende's defense minister Jose Toha, who was found hanged in a closet while in military custody.

Note: For important revelations from major media sources about assassinations of prominent political figures, click here.

“Unlawful Killing,” a documentary about the death of Princess Diana that began to stir up controversy even before it got [to the Cannes Film Festival, was] directed by Keith Allen [and] earned global [comment] for including a graphic image of the aftermath of the car accident that took Diana’s life in 1997, the details of which have historically been distorted in the interest of taste. The photo does appear in “Unlawful Killing,” but only for a moment, and within the legitimate context of Allen’s claim that Diana received tardy and inadequate care immediately after the wreck and that a more timely response would have saved her life. “Unlawful Killing,” which is part of the Cannes “Marche du Film,” or Film Market, and played here ... to a packed house of buyers and critics, will surely raise hackles for the additional ... accusations Allen levels in the film. These include allegations ... that Diana was murdered, most likely by a cabal involving the royal family, the political establishment and the secret services; that she was killed because she was threatening the British arms industry with her work against land mines; and that the inquest into the death ... was little more than a coverup in which the media were ... complicit.

Note: For more on Princess Diana's mysterious death, click here.

A jury in Memphis decided last month that Dr. King was not the victim of a gunman acting alone, but was instead the victim of a far-reaching conspiracy that included the United States government. This year's national holiday ... comes just weeks after the controversial verdict was delivered. At Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. King preached his gospel of nonviolence, the Rev. Joseph L. Roberts Jr. said the verdict confirmed what he had always suspected: that Dr. King's assassination was a conspiracy. Dr. King's widow and children have long questioned Mr. Ray's 1969 conviction, and hoped that their civil suit would change the legal and historical record of the assassination. And on Dec. 8, a Memphis jury seemed to give them what they wanted. The jury declared that Loyd Jowers, 73, a retired Memphis restaurant owner, was liable in Dr. King's death for purportedly hiring a Memphis police officer, now dead, to kill Dr. King. The jury also found that unnamed others, including government agencies, had been involved, in effect accepting the King family's contention that Mr. Ray was innocent, despite his guilty plea. Mr. Jowers, through his lawyer, has said he participated in a conspiracy but did not know it was a plot to kill Dr. King. The jury awarded the King family members the damages they had sought: $100, which they say they will donate to charity. The Memphis jury was the first to hold someone accountable for playing a role in Dr. King's assassination.

Note: Why haven't you heard about this stunning trail verdict? And why wasn't this front page news? For an excellent, six-minute Canadian news broadcast on this amazing court case and verdict, click here. For the complete transcript of this highly revealing trial, click here. And for dozens of major media articles suggestion that the assassinations of both Kennedys and King were not the work of a lone gunman, click here. For some of the awesome and inspiring quotes and audio and video clips of Martin Luther King, Jr., click here.

Convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot to shoot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his bullets did not kill the presidential candidate, lawyers for Sirhan said in new legal papers. The documents filed this week in federal court detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis. The papers point to a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress as the controller who led Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion. For the first time, Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into "range mode" believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes. "I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy," Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and expert in trauma memory and hypnosis. He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief. The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.

Note: For many key reports from major media sources on political assassinations in the US, click here.

In his new book, 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read, former wrestler turned governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura takes a close and at times disturbing look at major historical events. Ventura draws on public but often overlooked information about such events as John F. Kennedy's assassination and the 9/11 attacks, offering fresh, often intriguing insights. Here is an excerpt: "There is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment." – John F. Kennedy This book is titled 63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read, lest we forget that 1963 was the year that claimed the life of our 35th President. The conspiracy that killed JFK, and the cover-up that followed, is the forerunner for a lot of what you're going to read about in these pages. In fact, the idea behind this book came out of writing my last one, American Conspiracies. In poring through numerous documents, many of them available through the Freedom-of-Information Act, I came to realize the importance of the public's right to know. Let me begin by saying how concerned I am that we're moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.

Note: Jesse Ventura reveals amazing information in this powerful interview. You might appreciate the video and all 10 pages available at the ABC News link above. For key reports from major media sources that shed light on the unsolved assassination of JFK and other major US political leaders, click here.

A jury in a civil suit brought by the family of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decided today that a retired Memphis cafe owner was part of a conspiracy in the 1968 killing of Dr. King. The jury's decision means it did not believe that James Earl Ray, who was convicted of the crime, fired the shot that killed Dr. King. After four weeks of testimony and one hour of deliberation, the jury in the wrongful-death case found that Loyd Jowers as well as ''others, including governmental agencies'' had been part of a conspiracy. The jury awarded the King family the damages they had sought: $100, which the family says it will donate to charity. The family has long questioned Mr. Ray's conviction and hoped the suit would change the legal and historical record of the assassination. Mr. Jowers, in a 1993 television interview, said that he had hired a Memphis police officer to kill Dr. King from the bushes behind his restaurant. Mr. Jowers said he had been paid to do so by a Memphis grocery store owner with Mafia connections. In an unlikely alliance, the King family was represented in the case by William Pepper, who had been Mr. Ray's lawyer. The King family maintains that Mr. Pepper's version of the assassination is the one that gets at the real truth behind Dr. King's death, not the official version with Mr. Ray as the gunman. Mr. Pepper said federal, state and Memphis governmental agencies, as well as the news media conspired in the assassination.'

Note: For an awesome six-minute clip on this most important trial, click here. For other major media article with powerful evidence of conspiracies to kill the Kennedy brothers and more, click here. And for more from the MLK family on this incident, see their fascinating discussion at this link.

For nearly nine months the congressional investigations of the Central Intelligence Agency have been conducted behind closed doors. In the old Senate caucus room the ten members of the select Senate committee were questioning CIA officials, including Director William Colby and the deputy director for science and technology, Sayre Stevens, about 11 gm. of shellfish toxin and 8 mg. of cobra venom discovered last May in a CIA storeroom. Colby revealed that the agency in 1952 began a supersecret research program, code-named M.K. Naomi, partly to find countermeasures to chemical and biological weapons that might be used by the Russian KGB. CIA researchers ... came up with an array of James Bond weaponry that could use the shellfish toxin and other poisons as ammunition. To illustrate his testimony, Colby handed a pistol to Committee Chairman Frank Church. Resembling a Colt .45 equipped with a fat telescopic sight, the gun fires a toxin-tipped dart, almost silently and accurately up to 250 ft. Moreover, the dart is so tinythe width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch longas to be almost indetectable, and the poison leaves no trace in a victim's body. Charles Senseney, an engineer for the Defense Department, told the Senators that he had devised dart launchers that were disguised as walking canes and umbrellas.

Note: This silent, lethal dart gun causes what looks like a natural heart attack. If this sophisticated assassination technology was available back in 1975, what kind of secret weapons do you think they have now? To watch an incredible one-minute video clip on this dart gun, click here. To watch the full, highly revealing Warner Brothers documentary Secrets of the CIA, click here. For other riveting major media articles along these lines, click here.

More than four decades after Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, his convicted murderer wants to go free for a crime he says he can't remember. It's been this way almost from the beginning. Hypnotists and psychologists, lawyers and investigators have tried to jog his memory with no useful result. "There is no doubt he does not remember the critical events," said William F. Pepper, the attorney who will argue for Sirhan's parole. "He is not feigning it. He does not remember it." Pepper, a New York-based lawyer who also is a British barrister, is the latest advocate of a second gunman theory. Believers claim 13 shots were fired while Sirhan's gun held only eight bullets and that the fatal shot appeared to come from behind Kennedy while Sirhan faced him. Pepper also suggests Sirhan was "hypno-programmed," turning him into a virtual "Manchurian Candidate." Pepper said ... that he has had Sirhan examined several times by psychologist Daniel Brown of Harvard University, an expert in hypnosis of trauma victims. "There have been substantial breakthroughs. It was very clear to me that this guy did not kill Bob Kennedy," said Pepper. The lawyer notes that he has a personal tie to Kennedy, having been chairman of his citizens' committee when he ran for Senate in 1964. Pepper also represented James Earl Ray, through 10 years of appeals and a civil trial which he said proved that Ray was not King's killer. By then Ray was dead. By all accounts, Sirhan has been a model prisoner. Sirhan is a Christian and had no ties to terrorist groups.

Note: Few people know about the US civil trial in 1999 in Memphis where a jury took only one hour to rule that elements within government were guilty of conspiring to shoot Dr. Martin Luther King. For an astounding six-minute news clip on this little reported trial, click here. For summaries of many other major media articles suggesting a cover-up around the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, click here.

Today, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the ... Democratic Republic of Congo. Thousands of Belgian officials who lingered on did their best to sabotage things: their code word for Lumumba in military radio transmissions was “Satan.” Shortly after he took office as prime minister, the C.I.A., with White House approval, ordered his assassination and dispatched an undercover agent with poison. The would-be poisoners could not get close enough to Lumumba to do the job, so instead the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival politicians who seized power and arrested the prime minister. On Jan. 17, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, he was shot. Stephen R. Weissman, a former staff director of the House Subcommittee on Africa, recently pointed out that Lumumba’s violent end foreshadowed today’s American practice of “extraordinary rendition.” The Congolese politicians who planned Lumumba’s murder checked all their major moves with their Belgian and American backers, and the local C.I.A. station chief made no objection when they told him they were going to turn Lumumba over — render him, in today’s parlance — to the breakaway government of Katanga, which, everyone knew, could be counted on to kill him.

Note: The author of this article, Adam Hochschild, is the author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and the forthcoming To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

It started with a fingerprint of a 25-year-old college professor who opposed the Vietnam War and ended with a search for his remains, 32 years later, in a wooded area near Eveleth, Minn. The FBI's files on Paul and Sheila Wellstone [show that] the FBI initially took interest in Wellstone as part of the broader surveillance of the American left ... and, in the end, [sifted] through the wreckage of the fatal plane crash that killed Wellstone and seven others eight years ago. Wellstone's surviving sons declined to comment on the documents, which were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by MPR News. The FBI did not include 76 pages related to the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that investigated the crash. A request for those records is pending. Coleen Rowley, the 9/11 whistleblower and former chief legal advisor in the FBI's Minneapolis office, said the documents from 1970 shed light on the FBI's far-reaching efforts to quash political dissent. "I think this really is valuable … because it's basically history repeating what we have right now," she said, noting the recent FBI raids at the homes of several anti-war organizers in Minneapolis. Wellstone's arrest occurred less than a year before the official end of Cointelpro, a series of secret domestic surveillance programs created by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to monitor and disrupt groups deemed to be a threat to national security.

Note: For insights into the deeper implications of Senator Wellstone's mysterious plane crash, click here.

Not since the end of the Cold War has the Pentagon spent so much to develop and deploy secret weapons. But now military researchers have turned their attention from mass destruction to a far more precise challenge: finding, tracking, and killing individuals. Every year, tens of billions of Pentagon dollars go missing. The money vanishes not because of fraud, waste or abuse, but because U.S. military planners have appropriated it to secretly develop advanced weapons and fund clandestine operations. Next year, this so-called black budget will be even larger than it was in the Cold War days of 1987, when the leading black-budget watchdog, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), began gathering reliable estimates. The current total is staggering: $58 billionenough to pay for two complete Manhattan Projects.

Note: For other detailed reports on Pentagon weapons development, click here and here.

That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am a Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, Dr. King’s room, on the night he was assassinated. But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer. On [September 12], The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Mr. Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. From at least 1968 to 1970, Mr. Withers, who was black, provided photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to two F.B.I. agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program, Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, according to numerous reports summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site. While he was growing close to top civil rights leaders, Mr. Withers was also meeting regularly with the F.B.I. agents, disclosing details about plans for marches and political beliefs of the leaders, even personal information like the leaders’ car tag numbers.

Note: For a fascinating CNN interview with civil rights leader and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young on this issue, click here. For key reports from reliable sources raising unanswered questions about the assassination of Martin Luther King and other major US political leaders, click here.

Nearly 40 years before the Obama White House denounced the WikiLeaks website for publishing classified documents, another president, Richard Nixon, was even more obsessed with the same phenomenon. Only Nixon and his top aides went to far greater lengths to deal with the problem: They launched an extraordinary campaign to smear and discredit the journalist who, more than anyone else, was bedeviling them by publishing government secrets: newspaper columnist Jack Anderson. The White House obsession with Anderson — whose "Washington Merry Go-Round" column was the WikiLeaks of its day — is detailed in a new book being published this month, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture, by journalism professor Mark Feldstein. The book relies in part on newly unearthed tapes from the National Archives that document how Nixon’s aides plotted to destroy Anderson by planting forged evidence with him and spreading false rumors about his sex life and that of one of his associates. Feldstein also has uncovered new evidence that documents one of the more outrageous schemes of the Nixon presidency: a plot to assassinate Anderson by either putting poison in his medicine cabinet or exposing him to a “massive dose” of LSD by smearing it on the steering wheel of his car.

Note: For more on the use of LSD and other substances by the CIA for mind control and assassination, click here.

A retired FBI agent from Summit County is making claims regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that go beyond conspiracy theories. Don Adams ... doesn't waiver from his position that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. "It is a fact," says Adams, and he says he has the FBI documents to prove it. One of Adams first assignments was investigating an extreme right radical, with connections to the States Rights Party and KKK named Joseph Adams Milteer. One week after completing the investigation, President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas. Agent Adams located Milteer in Quintan, Georgia on November 27, 1963, but according to Adams, the Senior Agent in charge would not allow a proper interrogation. "I said, 'Boss wait a minute, we have an opportunity to elicit tremendous information from him' and he replied '5 questions and nothing more'." Years later, while searching the archives Adams learned that Milteer had threatened to kill President Kennedy November 9, 1963, just weeks before the assassination, and that FBI agents had allegedly lied about his whereabouts immediately following [the] threat. An FBI record states that after the assassination, "a jubilant" Milteer bragged to the informant, "You thought I was kidding when I said he would be killed from a window with a high powered rifle." Adams questions why Milteer appears in a photograph near President Kennedy's limousine before the shooting, but was never mentioned in the Warren Commission Report.

Note: For key articles from reliable sources on many still-unanswered questions about the John Kennedy and other major political assassinations, click here.

Mafia bosses planned to "compromise" Bobby and Edward Kennedy at a New York party in a plot involving Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, according to FBI documents. The intention was to work through "associates" of the two stars to lure the Kennedys, as well as Peter Lawford, their British actor brother-in-law and fellow member of Sinatra's "rat pack", into actions they would regret. The plot is thought to have fizzled out, but it is consistent with other accounts of the extraordinary links between [the Kennedys], the country's biggest stars and organised crime. Monroe, who died in 1962, allegedly had affairs with both Bobby Kennedy and John F Kennedy. It has previously been claimed that she passed on pillow talk from Bobby Kennedy to Sinatra who in turn passed them on to his mafia friends. As attorney general Robert Kennedy launched several investigations into the mob which it may have felt warranted a measure of retribution. From early on in his four-decade career in the senate, Edward Kennedy, the youngest of the three brothers, was known for his affairs with women and extravagant drinking habits. Papers released earlier this year the library of former president Richard Nixon showed that in the early 1970s he discussed with the aides the possibility of discrediting Kennedy by leaking news of his infidelities. Agents in Milwaukee took the information from an unidentified source "who had furnished reliable information in the past," according to the memo. However, the informant could not verify the truth of any of the rumor's details.

A mirror. Two flickering candles. And Sirhan Sirhan. Focusing his mind power on the looking glass, Sirhan soon convinced himself that he could order an inanimate object to move. He rigged a pendulum from a fisherman's weight, and on command, he said, it began to sway. Yet telekinesis—the ability to cause objects at a distance to move through the exercise of will—was a frightening power, and Sirhan feared that he might lose his mind. The candles swayed and changed color. Sirhan insisted that it was no trick of imagination, reported Dr. Bernard L. Diamond. The noted psychoanalyst, who combines professorships in law, psychiatry and criminology at the University of California at Berkeley, was the star witness for Sirhan's defense. His testimony buttressed the diagnoses of five other experts that Sirhan was afflicted with paranoia and schizophrenia. Sirhan professes that he has no recollection of shooting Kennedy. Prosecutor David Fitts peppered the diminutive professor with hostile questions, but he could not blunt the thrust of Diamond's testimony about murder in a trance. After two more psychologists declared that Sirhan suffers from grave mental disorders, avuncular Attorney Grant Cooper rested for the defense. The prosecution faces an uphill struggle to refute contentions that Sirhan was either insane or suffering from diminished mental responsibility.

Note: This article confirms that Sirhan was not mentally competent at the time Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, but it suggests that Sirhan's "trance state" was self-induced. Other sources, however, have argued that he was a victim of mind control; click here for more information on this possibility.

Only five days before a car bomb planted by agents of the Pinochet regime rocked downtown Washington D.C. on September 21, 1976, [assassinating Chilean exile diplomat Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronni Moffitt,] Secretary of State Henry Kissinger rescinded instructions sent to, but never implemented by, U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone to warn military leaders there against orchestrating "a series of international murders," declassified documents obtained and posted by the National Security Archive revealed today. The instructions effectively ended efforts by senior State Department officials to deliver a diplomatic demarche, approved by Kissinger only three weeks earlier, to express "our deep concern" over "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians, and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad." "The September 16th cable is the missing piece of the historical puzzle on Kissinger's role in the action, and inaction, of the U.S. government after learning of Condor assassination plots," according to Peter Kornbluh, the Archive's senior analyst on Chile and author of the book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. "We know now what happened: The State Department initiated a timely effort to thwart a 'Murder Inc' in the Southern Cone, and Kissinger, without explanation, aborted it," Kornbluh said.

Note: George H.W. Bush was head of the CIA when Orlando Letelier was assassinated just a few blocks away from the director's office. For the full text of the documents click on the link above. For an analysis, click here.

Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations in the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Tex., November 22, 1963. Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy. The [original] investigation into the possibility of conspiracy in the assassination was inadequate. The conclusions of the investigations were arrived at in good faith, but presented in a fashion that was too definitive. The Department of Justice failed to exercise initiative in supervising and directing the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the assassination. The Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President. The Central Intelligence Agency was deficient in its collection and sharing of information both prior to and subsequent to the assassination. The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.

Note: This same US Congressional report, on the subject of the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination, states that "The committee believes, on the basis of the circumstantial evidence available to it, that there is a likelihood that James Earl Ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King as a result of a conspiracy." Why hasn't this information been widely reported and become public knowledge? Explore a possible answer. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on assassinations from reliable major media sources.

A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly's death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead. And a 30-year secrecy order has been placed on written records provided to Lord Hutton's inquiry which were not produced in evidence. Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has conducted his own investigations into Dr Kelly's death, described the order as "astonishing". Dr Kelly's body was found in woods close to his Oxfordshire home in 2003, shortly after it was revealed that he was the source of a BBC report casting doubt on the Government's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being fired within 45 minutes. An inquest was suspended by then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who ruled that Lord Hutton's inquiry could take its place. But ... the inquiry focused more on the question of how the BBC report came to be broadcast than on the medical explanation for Dr Kelly's death. Lord Hutton's report in 2004 concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist. But the finding has been challenged by doctors who claim that the weapons inspector's stated injuries were not serious enough.

Note: For a cache of illuminating reports on government secrecy, click here.

The investigation into the assassination of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, murdered with a poison-filled pellet shot into his leg (possibly with a converted "umbrella gun") at a bus stop in Britain in 1978, was the most unusual and significant case that medical doctor and forensic specialist Christopher C. Green participated in during his twenty year career as an investigative officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. The reason it was so unique, he says, is that "we had pretty much all of the story from a forensic point of view. We had the body, the thing in the body that he was hit with -- the pellet -- and the stuff from the pellet. We knew that the material used to kill him, ricin, had been under development by a foreign service linked to the incident. We also knew that he had been a target of assassination attempts in the past. The story of him being a target was very well known. So we had information on the means, motive, and the opportunity." In the Markov case, "we had 80 percent of the story," says Green, who is now a professor of diagnostic radiology and psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Wayne State University's Detroit Medical Center, where he uses brain imaging techniques to watch how the brain functions as people make decisions. His current work, he says, is a logical outgrowth of his service at the CIA -- where he still serves as a consultant. At the CIA, Green studied how the brain responds to chemicals and neurological agents.

Note: For more on this bizarre case, click here. A 2008 Reuters article on the case is also available here, as is a 2006 New York Times article at this link.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.