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The killing of an Indian student in North Carolina in United States does not appear to be a case of gang violence, the police have said. Senior Indian Embassy officials are traveling to his university on Monday to meet the authorities and make arrangements for sending his body back home.
Abhijeet Mahato, 29, an IIT alumnus who was studying for an engineering doctorate degree at the Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering in Durham, was found dead at his residence near the campus on Friday night. He had been shot dead.
It is hoped that the body of Mahato, a native of Jharkhand, will be released after the autopsy on Monday, following which arrangements can be made to take it to India.
Detectives and crime-scene technicians spent the early morning hours of Saturday combing the spot and found some clues, media reports said. The police chief of Durham, Jose Lopez, has been quoted in local reports as saying that the crime is not believed to be related to gang violence.
At Duke, officials responded to the news by sending out an all-campus e-mail early on Saturday apprising students, staff and faculty about the incident. Federal law requires universities to issue timely warnings of any incident that might pose an ongoing threat to students or employees.
The killing of Mahato, who was working in the Duke Computational Mechanics Lab, comes barely a month after two Indian doctoral students from Andhra Pradesh were found shot dead in the Louisiana State University campus.