An Indian-origin Gujarati woman working at a gas station in the US state of South Carolina was shot in the face in an attempted armed robbery and succumbed to her injuries on Saturday.

Mradulaben Patel was the co-owner of a store at a gas station in Powdersville. An unidentified man is believed to have shot Patel in the face Thursday night. Police has asked for help to identify the assailant. She died on Saturday, succumbing to her injuries, sources said.

Patel holds American and British citizenship. It appeared to be an attempted robbery and not a racial attack, they said. Officials of the Indian Consulate in Atlanta have spoken to her husband. Her family has not sought any assistance from the Indian mission, they added. Police were quoted as saying that video footage shows a man walking into the store and buying a pack of cigars.

Authorities are reviewing the surveillance footage that showed the suspect, moments before, asking for cigars and then shooting Patel. A man named Michael Wheat saw Patel lying on the floor as he walked into the store late at night and called the police, Fox Carolina reported. "I saw her lying there on the floor, bleeding pretty bad," said Wheat, adding that Patel had blood all over her head and on the floor.

Wheat said he left the store and got in his truck from where he called emergency assistance number 911. He said he ran back into the store without knowing whether or not the shooter had already left the scene of the incident.

"She was kinda moaning as she was breathing," said Wheat. Customers of the shop remembered Patel as a friendly woman. "She always asked how everybody was, their day was, (and) she asked how my daughter was every day that I came in here," Shalynn Zarczynski, a frequent customer of Patel's, said.