Smuggling

I don't know how new these sources were (it has a 2.6 year half-life), but "Turkish police in the Black Sea region seize 18.1 grams of radioactive californium". Estimated value 72M$. That's a bit more than 3 quarters in weight. It was under the gear shift in the car.

The dose rate is about 2200-2300 rem (m^2 / gram hour). Let's see. 18.1g means about 40krem (m^2 / hour). If the driver was 1m away, and passengers 2m away (you can ignore shielding effects of the material around it--these are neutrons), and the trip was 3 hours, the passengers got about a 30,000 rem dose of neutrons and the driver 4x as much. And they'd get about 1/14 as much of that dose in gammas as well. The LD50/30 (50% die in 30 days) dose is about 450rem.

10,000 rem means death in 0-5 days.

Even if the source was 2 half lives (5.2 years) old, if it was pure you'd still expect the couriers to die--and maybe pass out on the trip.

"In a scare in March of last year, police in Ankara said they had seized a whopping 1.4kg of the same substance in a car following a tip-off. It turned out to be false alarm, as the haul was later found to have no trace of nuclear or radioactive material, and was, in fact, organic matter." I wonder if this will be similar, or if somebody was being very careless.