Arpana's body to arrive by the weekend

HYDERABAD: The body of Arpana Jinaga, the techie from Hyderabad who was found murdered at her apartment in Seattle in the US, is likely to be flown here in a couple of days, her family members said.

Arpana's parents are not going to the US from here as their family friends in Seattle would be receiving the body after the autopsy and some formalities.

According to her family members, the body is likely to be flown in by Saturday after some paper work. Jayaram, a friend of Arpana's father BC Jinaga, will accompany the body.

Jayaram, who visited Arpana's home on Monday after a phone call from her father, had found her dead.

Jinaga, who got an emergency visa from US consulate in Chennai, decided against going to US after a communication from Seattle that Jayaram would receive the body on their behalf.

The consul general of India at San Francisco Sushmita G Thomas informed the regional passport officer in Hyderabad that they were taking steps to facilitate transportation of Arpana's body to India.

A communiqué from the consul general said Arpana's family friends were in touch with the local authorities to complete the formalities.

Arpana, 24, lived alone in the apartment in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle. She worked with the EMC Corporation in Seattle.

Redmond police said Arpana was strangled in her apartment at about 3.30 a.m. Saturday and the signs found at the crime scene suggest that she resisted the killers.

The motive of the crime is still not known. Arpana's family said they had not received any information either about the killers or their motive.

Arpana, who left for the US in 2005, completed her MS in embedded systems from Rutger's State University in New Jersey and had recently taken up the job of a software engineer in EMC Corporation in Seattle.

Her father BC Jinaga is director of school of information technology at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University here.

Jinaga, who hails from Gadag in Karnataka, settled here in 1990. He is a distant relative of Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa.

Arpana is the fifth student from Andhra Pradesh to be killed in the US under mysterious circumstances in less than a year.

T Soumya Reddy, a postgraduate student, was killed by an unidentified assailant in Chicago in September this year.

Soumya, 23, who was pursuing MS in electrical engineering at the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville campus, was found dead in a car near a lake. Her cousin Vikram Reddy, 27, who was a software engineer in Chicago, was also found shot dead in the lake.

Srinivas, a postgraduate medical student from Karimnagar, was found murdered in Pennsylvania in March.

A Kirankumar and K Chandrasekhar Reddy, both PhD students, were shot dead in their apartment at Louisiana University in December 2007.