One of the reports mentioned their dead bodies being found left on railroad tracks. That... doesn't sound like radiation poisoning to me.

They were dead first though. I thought of that as disposing of the evidence to make it look like suicide.

It depends on how you get poisoned, but unless you suffer straight up burned to death (i.e. nuclear bomb), it seems that most of them result in slow deaths.

Unless the rails are super radioactive.

I tried to imagine someone being poisoned by Polonium beforehand, but that results in a rather slow death, not an unmarked corpse that can be dumped on the tracks.

Certainly not gross radiation poisoning as the symptoms of that (swelling, lesions) are pretty unmistakable. Mild poisoning like polonium, if done over months or years can be harder to spot.

What I find interesting is that in the US the government is exceptionally diligent about pursuing the deaths of people it cares about (scientists working on state projects, politicians, Etc.) which the FBI (national police) investigates rather than the local police force.

Clearly these are people who are of interest to India's national defense (nuclear submarine engineers?) is there not a national police that would make it their mission to solve these questions?

Perhaps this is due to a more decentralized security apparatus in India?

This is an open question, as I don't know the answer but I am aware that in very large countries it is hard for a central government to control the provinces. Same in China.

That is a possible explanation. In the US the FBI's investigative powers supercedes that of the local police, and they are centrally managed from Washington DC with satellite offices in the various cities around the country. They are chartered with investigations that would cross state boundaries typically and are the investigative arm of the Department of Justice. The Russians and Canadians have similar services (examples of 'large countries') as does China.

I meant large in terms of people. It's hard to keep tabs of remote areas, but even harder to keep track of large groups of folks. This is why China's the best example.

There's a pretty good film from Hong Kong about that too: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1202514/

Edit: I misremembered: it's from Hong Kong, not South Korea.

The IMDB link says it's a HK film, and the actors listed are HK stars.

Thanks, edited. It was silly of me not to check when I linked to it.

Hulu seems to have a lot of Korean content, but the first time I try to seek something specific out, it comes up empty :(

So I was wrong about it being Korean (it's from Hong Kong -- I just misremembered), but it is on Netflix, as are a bunch of great Korean movies.

Awesome, thanks! Added it to the queue.

(I think my favorite Korean film to date has been The Good, The Bad and The Weird.)

Not fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_involving_radioactive_s...