By IANS,
Hyderabad : Yet another student from Andhra Pradesh has been found murdered in her apartment in Seattle in the US. Arpana Jinaga, 24, who was pursuing her MS degree, was killed by unidentified persons, her family members said here Tuesday.
She is the fifth Andhra student to be killed under mysterious circumstances in the US in less than a year.
Her family received the shocking news late Monday night. The police found the body in her apartment in Seattle after her relatives alerted the authorities that they had not heard from her for last three days.
The family members said the police suspected that she was strangled to death at least three days ago.
Arpana’s father, B.C. Jinaga, a professor with the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, said they were yet to get more details.
“We don’t know the motive. We don’t know what happened. All we came to know is that she is no more,” said Jinaga while trying to fight back his tears.
Jinaga, director of school of information technology at JNTU, said he alerted his relatives as he had received no communication from his daughter for three days.
A pall of gloom descended on Jinaga’s house in Mehdipatnam neighbourhood here as relatives and friends poured in after hearing the shocking news.
Jinaga said Arpana went to the US two years ago after completing her engineering from a private engineering college here. She was working as a software engineer and had joined the MS programme very recently.
During the past one year, four students from this southern state were found dead in the US.
T. Soumya Reddy, a post-graduate student, was killed by unidentified assailants in Chicago in September.
Soumya, 23, who was pursuing MS in electrical engineering at the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville campus, was found dead in a car near a lake. Her cousin Vikram Reddy, 27, who was a software engineer in Chicago, was also found shot dead in the lake.
Srinivas, a postgraduate medical student from Karimnagar, was found murdered in Pennsylvania in March.
A. Kirankumar and K. Chandrasekhar Reddy, both PhD students, were shot dead in their apartment at Louisiana University in December 2007.
Arpana’s murder came close on the heels of the murder in the US of three members of a family hailing from Andhra Pradesh.
The bodies of Jayalakshmi, 37, and her two children were found Oct 27 in their apartment in Novi township, 20 km from Detroit.
In another incident, unemployed computer programmer Lakshminivasa Rao Nerusu, belonging to Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, has been charged with the murder of his wife and two children. The police in the US said Nerusu left the country after committing the crime.