Akshay Vishal (above); Lakshmanmurthy at his home in Hyderabad on Thursday

Hyderabad, Jan. 15: A Satyam engineer was shot dead in the US after he stumbled on suspected burglars outside his apartment and refused to give them money.

Akshay Vishal, a 26-year-old mechanical engineer from Hyderabad, was working with Falcon Jet Airways, a Satyam client, in Little Rock, US police said. The tragedy comes in the middle of the accounting scandal in Satyam.

The suspects shot Vishal in the thigh and leg outside his apartment around 3pm on Tuesday, they said.

The assailants had not expected anyone to be home. “It appears Vishal had come home early from work that day,” the police said.

Friends shifted Vishal to a local hospital in critical condition, where he died in the early hours of Wednesday.

“His arteries bled profusely, leading to kidney failure,” Vishal’s father, Nandam Lakshmanmurthy, a BSNL general manager, was quoted by PTI as saying.

The killing is the latest in a series of murders of Indians in the US.

Arpana Jenega, an IT engineer in Seattle, was found dead in her apartment on November 3, 2008, while an engineering student in Southern Illinois University, T. Soumya Reddy, was found murdered in September. Her cousin Vikram Reddy, a software engineer in Chicago, was also found dead nearby.

Vishal had graduated in engineering from Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology in Hyderabad and obtained an MS degree from Alaska University.

His body is likely to be brought back in a week to his parents’ home in Prakashnagar near Begumpet in Hyderabad, PTI reported.

Vishal had been working in the US since 2005 but had never faced any hostility, Lakshmanmurthy said.

He added that Vishal’s friend Shiva had called up on Tuesday night to inform the parents that their son had been shot at for refusing to part with money on Tuesday evening.

“We thought he was recovering. But on Wednesday noon, we received the sad news.”

Lakshmanmurthy said: “He spoke to us on Tuesday and told us he was going out to buy provisions to celebrate Pongal. He promised to call us back after reaching home. When he returned and was entering the flat, he was attacked.”

Vishal’s parents have approached the state government and the minister in charge of Hyderabad district, Mohammed Ali Shabbir, to get their passports and visas processed quickly.