I'm starting to wonder if this guy was carrying the Polonium 210 to sell to terrorists, and his plan "backfired" on him. The "death bed" conversion to Islam is rather scary.
Can you say smuggling.
I think I read elsewhere that Pulonium 210 doesn't aerosolize very easy due to particle weight, and is most efficiently delivered via liquid (or possibly incorporation in prepared food?).
Makes me wonder if it wouldn't be ideally suited for a foodborne "dirty bomb" attack and if that isn't what was in the works here. A truly frightening thought.
With cost now known in addition to the sloppiness of the trail left behind it seems safe to assume that this wasn't a political assassination -- a good old fashioned car bomb would have been just as discrete.
This is beginning to remind me of Sum of All Fears - the book, not the movie. Remember the guy that got sick from the radioactive material whose sickness telegraphed that something sinister was afoot?
Maybe it's just tinfoil hat stuff, but there are some reasonable speculations to be made here.
One of the early MSM stories on this said it basically had to be ingested or put on some other path to the bloodstream.