Doctor from Andhra found dead in US

An Andhra Pradesh doctor pursuing his postgraduation in Pennsylvania was found dead over the weekend, the fourth Indian student to meet a violent end in the US in the past three months.

The 29-year-old student of internal medicine, Akkaldevi Srinivas, was expected to return home in the next two months to practise in Karimnagar town and marry fiancée Jayashree. They got engaged last November when Srinivas was here on holiday.

His family members at Korutla in Karimnagar district said they found out about the death late on Sunday. Srinivas is believed to have died on Friday night.

An MBBS student of the 1995 batch of Gandhi Medical College in Hyderabad, Srinivas had joined Scranton State University for an MD programme in 2005 after completing his MS. He went to the US in 2002.

His phone allegedly went dead on Friday. Worried, his family contacted friends and relatives in the US, and came across a police bulletin about Srinivas’s death. Further enquiries confirmed the report.

His parents, Bhagyalakshmi and Anjaiaha, were shocked. They suspect Srinivas was killed in his room by someone who had come to rob him.

“His body has several knife injuries and cuts,” said one of his associates at the university who identified the body.

“Dr Srinivas has been hit with hard substances on his head and there were several bruises on his body,” said his father, a retired state government employee.

But PTI later said preliminary investigation by the police pointed at suicide.

A friend of Srinivas informed the family that the doctor’s body was found on Saturday in a pool of blood with stab wounds on his neck.

Anjaiaha has left for the US to bring home his son’s body.

His family members have appealed to the government for assistance to bring back the body and get the incident investigated.

Two PhD students from Andhra — Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allan — were killed in their Louisiana University campus apartment in December 2007. The police are yet to catch the assailants.

Abhijeet Mahato, a 29-year-old PhD student from Orissa at Duke University, was found shot dead in January. An estimated 80,000 Indian students study annually in the US — the largest number from any country.

In the wake of the recent spate of attacks on students, the Indian embassy in the US has asked the student community to keep it informed about their whereabouts and contact numbers.

The embassy has also asked the students to leave their forwarding numbers in India with it.

News Source : Samachar