A student from Andhra Pradesh was found murdered in the United States by unidentified persons in the fifth case of a young post-graduate student from the state being killed under mysterious circumstances in that country in the last one year.

2 Indian students murdered in US

Arpana Jinaga (24), who was pursuing her MS degree at Seattle, was killed sometime on Friday evening (US time), family sources told PTI. The tragedy came to light three days after the crime and an investigation has begun, they said.

The motive for the murder was not immediately known. Jinaga, who completed her engineering from a city-based private engineering college in 2005, was working as a software engineer and simultaneously pursuing MS.

Soumya Reddy cremated in Hyderabad 

She is among the top-20 professionals of embedded systems in the world, the sources said. Jinaga's father, B C Jinaga, is a professor with the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in Hyderabad and heads the School of Information Technology.

The murder of Jinaga comes close on the heels of a string of murders of students of Indian origin from Andhra Pradesh. Soumya Reddy, a post-graduate student, was killed by an unidentified assailant in Chicago in September this year. Another post-graduate medical student A Srinivas was found murdered in Pennsylvania in March while A Kirankumar and K Chandrasekhar Reddy, both PhD students, were shot dead at Louisiana University in December 2007.