Two men found “deadly radioactive poison” – historically used by Russia to assassinate its critics – while on an Easter egg hunt.
Instead of chocolate, a bottle containing a rare isotope labeled “Polonium 210” was found in the backyard garden of a home in the German city of Stuttgart.
What started as a report to the police ended with 138 emergency personnel and 41 vehicles deployed to the scene in Vahingen an der Enz.
A radiation protection unit was also dispatched after the discovery of a white plastic bottle with a red lid.
A spokesman for the fire department said, “It’s not just handwritten on the label; it’s clearly and officially marked.”
Although tests are still pending, the vial is considered “genuine”.
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The liquid – which weighs an estimated 200 grams – is relatively heavy, which makes it consistent with the fact that polonium-210 is a relatively dense substance.
Often described as an unkillable poison, it was behind the assassination of Kremlin critic and former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.
After moving to the UK in 2000, he became a staunch critic of Vladimir Putin and began working for MI6 as a consultant.
He was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 during a meeting with former KGB agents Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun at London’s Millennium Hotel in 2006, and died in agony three weeks later.
On his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Putin himself of ordering his assassination.
The death of Palestinian political leader Yasser Arafat in 2004 is also widely suspected to be a polonium-210 assassination.
Swiss scientists found levels 18 times higher than normal in their remains in 2013.
Once swallowed, the isotope is difficult to detect because all the radiation remains in the body.
A lethal dose can be as small as a few milligrams, given either as a powder or dissolved in liquid.
It is one of several radioactive poisons that can be used as a lethal weapon while causing no harm to the killer.
If it is stored in a glass bottle like the one in Stuttgart, the radiation remains inside.
Germany’s Environment Ministry will now test what is hidden inside it.
Whether or not the vial actually contained polonium still needed to be determined definitively.
