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Updated: Jun 03, 2016 01:42 IST

The gunman who killed University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) professor William Klug was on Thursday identified as 38-year-old Indian student Mainak Sarkar.

In 2000, Sarkar graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur with a degree in aerospace engineering.

“Mainak was a brilliant student. He remained busy with studies and did not talk or socialise much. As far as I remember, he was from Kolkata,” a professor of aerospace department of IIT-Kharagpur, who was not authorised to speak to the media, told HT.

According to his online profile, Sarkar worked for Infosys in Bengaluru from 2000 to 2001 before going to the US.

Before enrolling at UCLA, Sarkar earned a master’s degree at Stanford University, according to his LinkedIn page.

He also had a stint as a research assistant at the University of Texas and worked as a software developer.

Sarkar, a former doctoral student of Klug, accused him of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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Read | Police identify UCLA gunman as Indian student Mainak Sarkar

Klug, 39, was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and had been the target of Sarkar’s anger on social media for months, the report said.

“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 on March 10.

“He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust,” he wrote.

However, in his doctoral dissertation, submitted in 2013, Sarkar had expressed gratitude to Klug for his help and support, the paper said. “Thank you for being my mentor,” he wrote.

After UCLA, Sarkar worked as an engineering analyst for an Ohio-based rubber company, Endurica LLC, until August 2014.

The shooting prompted a complete lockdown of the campus and deployment of hundreds of police officers and agents.

All university classes were cancelled on Wednesday. The lockdown was lifted shortly after noon. Some 43,000 students are enrolled at the UCLA campus, according to its website.

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(with PTI inputs)