New Delhi: Just three days after Soumya Tummala Reddy, a MS student from Andhra Pradesh, was found shot dead in Chicago, her cousin's body has also been recovered from the bottom of a lake in the city.
Missouri Police found the body of Soumya's cousin Tummala Vikram Kumar Reddy on Monday.
Police say Vikram, a 27-year-old software engineer in Chicago, was shot as well and both the deaths were expected to have taken place around the same time.
Soumya had been found murdered in a car owned by Vikram on Sunday. The two reportedly shared the house in Maryville.
Even though the police did not discuss the specifics and stopped short of calling the shootings a murder-suicide but added that they did not suspect that any one else was involved.
The Reddy family, too, does not believe that it was a suicide case.
“Why were there bullet shots in both the bodies? If it was a suicide how can it be so harsh? How come the body was in water? Vikram's cousin, Ravindra Reddy, asked.
Soumya, 23-year-old, was an electrical engineering student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and was found shot dead near the Sunfish Lake in Spanish Lake, about 25 km from the Southern Illinois University (SIU) where she studied.
Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) joined the probe into the murder of a Soumya on Tuesday.
"Right now the investigation is focused on these two and we feel confident that only these two are involved at this time but until we talk to family and friends and really know what events led to this, we can’t say anything for sure. But right now our investigations are focusing on them,” says St Louis County Spokesperson Officer Rick Eckhard.
The police are treating it as a case of homicide, Director of International Programmes at SIU's Edwardsville campus, Ron Schaefer, said.
She is perhaps the first female Indian student murdered in recent memory in the US, leaving aside Minal Panchal, who was one of the 32 victims of a massacre on Virginia Tech campus in April last year.
At least four Indian students have been found murdered in the US since the sensational double murder of A Kiran Kumar and K Chandrasekhar Reddy, both PhD students from Andhra Pradesh, at Louisiana University in December 2007.
Abhijit Mahato, of Jharkhand, studying for his doctoral degree in engineering at Duke University in North Carolina, was found dead in January 2008. In March, A Srinivas, a postgraduate medical student from Karimnagar was killed.
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