A picture from an Orkut profile identifies the girl on the right as Soumya

New Delhi, Sept. 30: A young television journalist returning home late because of last night’s blasts in western India was found dead in south Delhi with a bullet in her head and another in a tyre of a car that had crashed into a road divider.

Soumya Vishwanathan, a news producer with Headlines Today, was discovered slumped in her Maruti Zen in the wee hours of Tuesday in the affluent Vasant Kunj. She lived a few metres from the spot where the car had come to a halt.

Vishwanathan, said to be 24, was returning from the late-night shift when the incident happened. She had spoken to her family around 3.30am.

According to her colleagues, Vishwanathan was to have left for home earlier but had volunteered to stay back when she heard about the blasts in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The office is 12km from her home.

The car had rammed against the road divider. A bullet had pierced the car’s tyre. Police took her to the trauma centre of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where she was declared dead on arrival.

The police said the doctors found a bullet on the right side of her head during post-mortem, but could not give any details of the sequence of events leading to her death.

“We don’t know when a bullet was fired at her. It could have been before or after her car rammed against the divider. We cannot say if someone was accompanying her at the time of the incident. We also don’t deny that it could be a possible incident of road rage. It could also have been the result of personal enmity. The matter is now being probed from all angles,” a senior police officer said.

The body has been handed over to her family. Vishwanathan is survived by her parents and an elder sister who got married a couple of years ago. She lived with her parents in Delhi. A PTI report said the family hailed from Kerala.

“A thoroughbred Delhiite” is how Vishwanathan described herself on Orkut, a social networking site. Her friends said she had a passion for films and was an avid television watcher. All she needed to survive, in her own words, were “cheese, chicken and chocolates...”.

Vishwanathan’s friend Kavita Shyam recalled: “I studied with her in Delhi’s Kamla Nehru College. She then went to the Asian College of Journalism. I remember her as a sharp and intelligent girl.”