May 4, 2002	Saturday	Safar 20, 1423

PARIS, May 3: The French Nuclear safety authority ASN (Autorite de surete nucleaire), in a communique issued on Thursday, has revealed that at least one employee of FedEx’s Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport facility was seriously contaminated with radioactivity on Dec 27 as he handled a package containing radioactive materials that apparently opened accidentally .

The employee — and possibly other employees who also had contact with the package — received a dose of 15 millisieverts (mSv), says ASN’s vice president Michel Bourguignon, which, he notes, is 15 times superior to the maximum amount of radiation to which a human being should be exposed in an entire year.

Although the ASN was made aware of the incident last January 8th, it says it chose to make the matter public only on May 2nd because the blood tests required to correctly diagnose contamination are several in number and have to be conducted over a long period of time.

But, indications from the United States would indicate that the reason for the delay concerns US suspicions that the package in question was sabotaged.

In all, the package spent five hours at FedEx’s Roissy-CDG hub. Today, authorities are not certain whether the package was sabotaged, if it was opened purposely, while at Roissy-CDG airport.