An Indian student in the United States has been arrested for posting violent messages on an Internet bulletin board urging readers to kill President George W Bush and his family.
Vikram Buddhi, a 34-year-old graduate student of Industrial Engineering and a teaching assistant at Purdue University in Indiana was picked up by the Secret Service last week.
According to the Federal Court records, the threats posted by Buddhi included messages urging readers to kill the president, the vice president and their families and bomb key sites in the United States.
Buddhi came to the United States in 1996 on a student F-1 visa and a spokesperson of Purdue University has confirmed his status in that school, the records said.
The investigation of Buddhi is said to have begun in December 2005 when a concerned reader reported the contents of the message board to the government.
That got the Secret Service into action working with the Purdue police to track down the source.
Buddhi has admitted making the threats as also using several IP addresses to conceal his identity, the local media quoted court documents as saying.
Buddhi has posted a bond for $10,000 and was released from the Tippecanoe County jail on Monday.
The Indian student who is said to be living in the West Lafayette area for the last 10 years is also said to have posted other threatening messages, including against Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and for the killing of all Republicans.
His lawyer John Martin said he did not consider his client's messages as direct threats. "They weren't sent to the White House."
"There were no letters sent to the White House, and if you read them, they're vulgar perhaps, but you wouldn't read them and think there is any serious intent," he said.
