Arpana Jenega

Hyderabad, Nov. 4: A Hyderabadi engineer doing her master’s in the US has been found murdered in her Seattle apartment three days after unknown attackers stabbed her repeatedly and slit her throat.

Arpana Jenega, 24, who worked with Microsoft in Seattle while studying in Rutgers University, New Jersey, is the sixth student from Andhra Pradesh murdered abroad in a year, five of them in America.

Officials here said parents of daughters studying in the US have flooded the Indian embassy in Washington with requests to look after their children’s safety.

The motive of Arpana’s killers is unknown, her father B.C. Jenega told reporters here this evening.

“She lived alone in a flat, but she shared one room downstairs with another girl student from Andhra Pradesh,” said Jenega, the head of the School of Information Technology at the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University here.

“I last spoke to her on Friday (the night she was killed). She was very excited about the US elections; she had been campaigning for Barack Obama…. We had since then been trying to contact her on her mobile and landline without success.”

The family then approached friends in Seattle who lodged a police complaint on Monday, which led to the body’s discovery.

“We learnt about the incident on Monday night. We don’t have any information about what happened; the police have not given us any information,” Jenega said. “All we know is that she is dead.”

US police are questioning the other Andhra girl who lived in the building. Sources said she had told officers she had left her flat in the morning and spent the weekend elsewhere.

Family sources said Arpana had been a “topper” in her BTech graduation examination, which she sat from the Vignan Institute of Technology and Science, Hyderabad, in 2005.

She had specialised in “embedded systems and solutions” — special-purpose computer systems designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions, as in digital watches, MP3 players or medical equipment.

Arpana had joined the Microsoft office in Seattle a few months ago to be able to pay her university fees, Jenega said.

“She was a very cheerful girl and popular in her colony and the institute,” said Sudha Patil, a former classmate at Vignan, who came to the Jenegas’ home to console them.

The murder comes seven weeks after Tummala Soumya Reddy, 23, a Hyderabad girl doing her master’s in electrical engineering at Southern Illinois University, was shot dead with her cousin in a park near Illinois.

The regional passport officer in Hyderabad, Bala Bhaskar, said he had received over 100 requests from parents since Soumya’s murder in September.

“All we can do is advise the Indian embassy and alert the students to be careful about what sort of friends they make on foreign soil,” he said.

In March, A. Srinivas of Karimnagar, an MD student in internal medicine at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was stabbed to death in his room on the campus.

In December last year, PhD students A. Kiran Kumar and K. Chandrasekhara Reddy, from Karimnagar and Kurnool, were trussed up and shot dead in their hostel room at Louisiana State University.

In May this year, V.S. Jyothirmayee, 23, a postgraduate medical student from Vijayawada, was murdered in her hostel room in a Birmingham suburb in the UK.

The FBI is investigating the murders of Soumya, found with a bullet in her mouth in a car and her cousin Vikram Reddy, 27, who was shot in the back and found in a lake.