A woman student from Andhra Pradesh was found murdered in the US by unidentified persons in the fifth case of a young post-graduate student from the state being killed under mysterious circumstances in that country in the last one year.

Arpana Jinaga (24), student of MS at Seattle, was killed in the early hours (IST) of Saturday, family sources said.

The incident came to light after three days and an investigation has begun, they said.

The cause and circumstances of the murder were not immediately known.

Jinaga completed her engineering from a city-based private engineering college in 2005.

She was working as a software engineer and simultaneously pursuing MS. She is among top-20 professionals of embedded systems in the world, the sources said.

Jinaga’s father, B C Jinaga, is a professor with the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University here and heads the School of Information Technology.

The murder of Jinaga came close on the heels of a string of murders of NRIs from Andhra Pradesh.

While A Srinivas, a PG medical student, Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam, both PhD students, were killed last year, T Soumya Reddy and her cousin Vikram Reddy were killed in September, 2008.