Two 25-gram bottles, one each of potassium cyanide and sodium cyanide, have gone missing from a laboratory at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Engineering.
A laboratory worker discovered that the bottles of highly toxic compounds were missing during an inventory check of poisons at around 1 p.m. on May 2. The matter was only reported to the university's management on Tuesday.
The compounds are fast-acting poisons — a dose of between 200 and 300 milligrams of either is considered lethal for an adult. If completely full, each bottle would contain enough of the chemicals to cause the deaths of at least 80 people. The university is not sure how much of the compounds remain in the missing bottles.