Hyderabad, Sept. 15: A 23-year-old woman from Hyderabad who was studying at a US university was shot dead in Illinois on Saturday night, police and her family said today.

The body of Soumya Reddy, who was doing her master’s in electrical engineering at Southern Illinois University, was found near her hostel, which is on the campus, her mother Hemlata said here today.

A PTI report, however, said the body was found in a car about 30km from the campus.

Hemlata said a university spokesman had called up last night to tell her Soumya had been killed by “black assailants”. The motive is not yet known.

Soumya is the fifth student from Andhra Pradesh to be murdered abroad, and the fourth in the US, in the past nine months.

She had left for the US in June 2007 with elder sister Sahaja, who is doing her master’s in computer science at Governors State University, Chicago, Illinois.

Hemalata said Soumya had told her on Saturday morning over the phone that she would go out in the evening to study for her semester with some other Telugu students.

“She celebrated her 23rd birthday last week. She was due to return home next May,” Hemlata said.

Soumya’s former classmates from the local Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology, where she did her BTech, gathered at her home today.

The family is from Manyala village of Adilabad district but has been living in Hyderabad for the past 15 years after the death of Soumya’s father, Bhupal Reddy.

In March this year, A. Srinivas, a student from the state’s Karimnagar district, was stabbed to death in his room on the campus of the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was studying for an MD in internal medicine.

Two months later, V.S. Jyothirmayee, 23, a postgraduate medical student from Vijayawada, was murdered in her hostel room in a Birmingham suburb in the UK.

In December last year, Allam Kiran Kumar and K. Chandrasekhar Reddy, PhD students from Karimnagar and Kurnool, were shot dead in their campus apartment at Louisiana State University, the US.