Reply #2: this is all so weird

[kineneb]

I went surfing over to the Der Spiegel site and read up on their report. Seems that whoever was transporting the polonium did it in a very clumsy manner. The scientists quoted in the article said one could not get contaminated sitting next to a person who had polonium in a paper container in their pants pocket (sorry about sentence construction- almost direct translation from the German).

A simple paper container would shield the carrier from contaminating his environment. What did Kovtun do? Roll around in the stuff?

Reference:

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,453823,00.html

(In German)