Amy Bishop and Gopi K Podila. (AP)

Washington, Feb. 15: The case of the Harvard-educated neurobiology professor who shot dead three academics, including Indian American Gopi K. Podila, and injured three other university employees in Alabama on Friday is getting curioser and curioser.

Law enforcement officials in Boston told the local media yesterday that Amy Bishop, who is in custody for the shootings was a suspect in a case where a parcel bomb was mailed in 1993 in an attempt to kill or harm a professor of medicine in Harvard.

The intended victim of the parcel bomb, Paul Rosenberg, who is also a practising doctor at Boston's Children's Hospital, was one of the evaluators of Bishop's Ph.D. work, officials told The Boston Globe.

It is believed that Bishop was concerned at that time that professor Rosenberg was about to give an unfavourable assessment of her doctorate work. On Friday, the shooting spree in Huntsville, Alabama, was said to have been provoked by a denial of tenure — life-time professorship — to Bishop by the University of Alabama.

The revelation about the mail bomb came a day after Bostonians were shocked to learn that the woman who is charged with the murders in Huntsville had shot and killed her brother in suburban Boston in 1986.

But just as Bishop was let off after fatally shooting her teenage brother, no one was charged for the parcel bomb sent to Rosenberg.

Bishop's husband, James Anderson, told The New York Times yesterday that “we were not suspects. They questioned everybody that ever knew” Rosenberg.

Bizarre as it may seem that Bishop was freed on the very day her bother was shot and killed at their home, Paul Frazier, the chief of police in Braintree, 16km south of Boston where the incident took place, told The Boston Globe that "I don't want to use the word 'coverup.' I don't know what the thought process was of the police chief at the time."

Frazier said Amy Bishop, who was found fleeing down a road after killing Seth Bishop and trying to stop a motorist at gunpoint, was taken to the police station, but the process of interrogating her was abruptly stopped and the girl was released.

The police chief said "the release of Ms. Bishop did not sit well with the police officers and I can assure you that this would not happen in this day and age."

India's consul-general in Houston, Sanjiv Arora, said his office was coordinating with the ministry of external affairs for facilitating an expedited US visa for Podila's brother which is being sought from the American consulate in Mumbai.

The brother lives in Gujarat and is hoping to attend Podila's last rites, which are to be held in Huntsville on Thursday, according to present plans.

A memorial service is likely to follow on Friday at the University of Alabama. Yesterday, a prayer service was held at the University Centre, followed by a memorial service at a local temple.

Arora said Podila's widow, Vani, a chartered accountant who has been active as member of the committee which runs the North Alabama Telugu Association, has been too distraught to talk. Podila leaves behind two children aged 14 and 12.

He was taught in college by his father, P S Prakash Rao, head of the department of biological-sciences at Nagarjuna University in Andhra Pradesh. Podila had barely recovered from the death of his father in December, friends said.

The irony of the Indian American being killed by his colleague who was denied tenure was that Podila was about the only member of their faculty who favoured tenure for Bishop.

William Setzer, chairman of the university's chemistry department who is also an adjunct member of the biology department, said he did not believe she had any friends in her department.

Setzer told The Chronicle of Higher Education, a Washington-based source for academics around the world, that he was "mildly surprised" that Bishop was denied tenure.

When Setzer asked Podila about it, the Indian American professor said that while he had himself supported Bishop, most of the faculty members in the department opposed tenure for the woman neurobiologist.