16 January,2009 12:22 PM IST | | PTI
A 20-year old man "strongly suspected" to have killed an Indian-techie, working with the the scam-hit Satyam Computers, was arrested by the police in the Arkansas state of the US.
The Little Rock Police is interrogating the suspect in connection with the killing of Andhra Pradesh engineer Akshay Vishal, who was shot dead on Tuesday, in the seventh case of young students and professionals from the state being killed in the last 14 months.
Name and other details of the arrested suspected assailant have not been released yet by the police, however the local media identified the arrested person as 20-year-old Brandon Johnson.
"We have been interviewing him (arrested person suspected of carrying out the murder) all day today," an official of Little Rock City Police Department told PTI on condition of anonymity, as he is not authorised to speak to the media.
"He is a strong suspect (of the murder)," the official said, adding that three search warrants have also been issued in past two days.
"The person, who we believe did it (the murder), is right here (arrested), but we are not releasing the details as investigation is still going on. We can't release any more detail at this point of time," the official said.
The police, who has been carrying an intensive investigation into the murder of Vishal, said more than a dozen people have been interrogated so far as part of the investigation.
Robbery is believed to be the prime motive behind the murder, investigations so far have revealed, the police said.
The police said the same night one more individual was murdered. "We are trying to investigate if there is any link between the two or both the different," the officials said.
Meanwhile local Little Rock media reported that Johnson has been involved in as many as 12 robberies and three murders in the past one month.
Of these two of the murders, including that of Vishal, happened on the same day. Vishal, 26, who came to the US from India, worked with Dessault Falcon Jet on behalf of Satyam.
His neighbours said he lived with his girlfriend, who called the police after he was shot at by the assailant.
A profusely bleeding Vishal was taken to hospital, where he succumbed to injuries. Meanwhile, the Indian Consulate in Houston has dispatched a senior official to help local authorities arrange quick transfer of body to India.
The killing is the latest one in the series of murders of Indian students and professionals in the US. Arpana B Jinaga, an IT engineer in Seattle was found dead in her apartment on November 3 while an engineering student in Southern Illionis University T Soumya Reddy was found murdered in September.
Her cousin Vikram Reddy, also a software engineer in Chicago, was also found dead nearby
