ULCA shooting: Gunman with 'kill list' was IIT Kharagpur alumnus

NEW DELHI: A gunman who killed a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), on Wednesday has been identified as former doctoral student Mainak Sarkar, 38, who graduated from IIT Kharagpur in aerospace engineering in 2000. Sarkar shot himself after killing William Klug, 39, under whom he had completed his PhD in mechanical engineering in 2013 and whom he accused of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, the Los Angeles Times reported. He is also believed to have murdered a woman, whom Everipedia described as his ex-girlfriend, at her home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, shortly before killing Klug. Police found a "kill list" at Sarkar's Minnesota home, indicating he had a few more targets. IIT Kharagpur officials and alumni association leaders said they could not readily recall whether Sarkar was a student there. The alumni list of the aerospace engineering department on the IIT Kharagpur website does mention one Manik Sarkar from the 2000 batch. Sarkar's Facebook page too features a group photograph taken in front of the aerospace engineering department. On March 10, Sarkar had written a blog calling Klug, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, "a very sick person" who should not be trusted. "William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy," Sarkar wrote, posting a picture of Klug. "My name is Mainak Sarkar. I was this guy's PhD student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it (to) another student. He made me really sick," Sarkar added.

Klug, the slain professor

"Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust. Stay away from this sick guy." A university source called the accusations "absolutely untrue", the LA Times reported. "The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic," the source was quoted as saying. Klug, a father of two, was a kind and caring man who had bent over backwards to help Sarkar finish his dissertation and graduate although the quality of his work was not stellar, the source added. "Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student," the source told LA Times. "He helped him out and interceded for him academically." In a copy of his 2013 dissertation posted online, Sarkar had thanked Klug: "I would like to thank my advisor, Dr William Klug, for all his help and support. Thank you for being my mentor." Yesterday, Sarkar left his address in a note found at the crime scene, requesting someone to go and "check on my cat", Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck said. It's unclear whether it was a suicide note, but it led investigators to Sarkar's Minnesota home, where they found extra ammunition and a list of people he intended to kill, the LA Times reported. "Professor Klug was on that list, as was another UCLA professor, who is all right, and whose name I'm not going to give out at this point, but also the name of a female," Beck said. "And so we did a follow-up investigation to that female's residence in a nearby town in Minnesota and found her deceased by gunshot wound." He declined to identify the woman, or say what connection she had to Sarkar, but he said there was evidence linking him to the killing. "The connection is very strong." According to Everipedia, the woman was his ex-girlfriend Ashley Hasti. The website said the couple had broken up and stopped being friends on Facebook. The police said Sarkar killed her before driving to UCLA and shooting Klug and then himself with a 9mm pistol at the professor's fourth-floor office in the university's Engineering Building IV. Asked about a motive, Beck said: "This is some mental issues, mental derangement, but it was tied to a dispute over intellectual property where Sarkar felt that he had had information released by the professor that harmed him. UCLA says this is absolutely not true, that this is the workings of his imagination." Beck said he did not know of any explicit threats Sarkar had made, in social media or elsewhere. Professors at UCLA "had some reservations about his conduct", he said, but "I don't think they thought he was a deadly threat". Sarkar was armed with two semi-automatic pistols and multiple magazines, Beck said. "He could have done much more damage with the ordnance he brought to UCLA," he said, "so there's small comfort in that." The police have asked for the public's help in finding the car Sarkar drove from Minnesota to California, a distance of about 3,150km, which they hoped would yield more evidence. It's a grey 2003 Nissan Sentra with Minnesota licence plates 720 KTW. Employer's praise According to Everipedia, Sarkar worked for Infosys in Bangalore in 2000-01 and as a research assistant at the University of Texas, Arlington, in 2002-03. In 2005, he graduated from Stanford University with an MSc in aeronautics and astronautics. From 2005 to 2007, Sarkar worked as a software developer at Lucid Technologies. After earning a PhD in mechanical engineering from UCLA in 2013, he worked remotely as an engineering analyst for Ohio-based rubber company Endurica LLC until August 2014. "Mainak is a steady contributor with solid technical skills in FEA (finite element analysis) and software development," Will Mars, Endurica president, posted on Sarkar's LinkedIn page on August 1, 2014, the Los Angeles Times reported. "I appreciate the quality of his work, and his careful approach to new problems. He has worked for Endurica in an off-site situation requiring great trust and independence, and he has performed well under those conditions." Matthew Uy, who provided many "endorsements" of Sarkar on LinkedIn, said he had worked in a lab at UCLA that "collaborated" with Sarkar, then a student, the Los Angeles Times reported. It quoted Uy as saying he had not spoken with or seen Sarkar in about five years and felt "pretty disconnected" from him in general. Indians wary The shooting can temporarily damage the atmosphere for the 3,000-odd Indian-origin students, mostly Indian citizens, who make up over seven per cent of the campus population, some of the Indian students said. Saibal Sengupta, an engineering master's student at UCLA, recalled seeing Sarkar frequently around the campus over the past few months, mostly alone, and almost always with a purposeful walk. "Some of us friends used to talk about how agitated he looked on some occasions," Sengupta told The Telegraph over the phone. "But none of us knew him. It's now, because of the photos, that we realise it's the same guy we used to see." Several current students, at least within the Indian community, knew Sarkar was a former research scholar at the engineering school, said Shyam Ratnakar, a 24-year-old pursuing a master's in computer science. "He had this air about him of being slightly aloof," Ratnakar recalled. The UCLA campus was to reopen today with counselling offered to students and teachers, Fox News said. It added that the initial reports of a shooting had prompted the university to send an alert to all the students and staff, notifying them to avoid the School of Engineering area. Photos posted on social media showed students using metal furniture, tables, belts - anything they could find - to secure doors because they did not lock from the inside, Fox reported. President Barack Obama was briefed aboard Air Force One about the shooting, according to the White House.