[Nuc1]

Blackened skin in minutes? Something is going on here. Even at 2000 Rem per hour, such as a pipe inspection source, a five minute exposure would only yield 166.7 Rem. At ten minutes, twice that. While that exposure would not be good for you, unless you were sickly you would easily survive. The folks in the plant at Chernobyl only got tanned skin and they were standing on a floor covered with burned fuel pellets. Perhaps an industrial sterilization source? Say 50,000 Rem/hr? That would do it but how many sources at that activity level exist in the world in private hands? An inadvertent critically could do this but I think that unlikely. Maybe I am wrong about that inadvertent criticality. People w/o education and proper instrumentation could easily, with the right material, assemble critical mass. It was done in Japan some time ago at a fuel plant. Something more is going on here than this article suggests.

[Candor7]

I agree, There was metion of a substance that the scientists had identified but would not report what it was toi the news media in India. It must have been very powerful stuff, maybe a little bit of raw plutonium casing or something.