Bengaluru Start-Up CEO Allegedly Kills Son in Goa, Travels Back to K'taka With His Body in Bag

In a shocking incident, a 39-year-old businesswoman from Bengaluru on Monday was booked for allegedly murdering her four-year-old son in North Goa and travelling back to Karnataka with his body in a bag.

The accused — Suchana Seth — had checked out of the service apartment in North Goa’s Candolim on Monday morning. While cleaning the apartment, a housekeeping staff had found bloodstains there.

Seth, who was back in Karnataka by now, was detained at Aimangala police station in the Chitradurga district based on an alert from the Goa Police. She was later arrested by Goa Police and produced before the magistrate court at Mapusa which sent her to six-day police custody.

DID THE COPS FIND THE CHILD’S BODY?

Calangute police station’s inspector Paresh Naik told Times of India that the 39-year-old founder and CEO of AI startup — Mindful AI — had given a Bengaluru address when she checked into room 404 at Hotel Sol Banyan Grande on Saturday.

She had booked the room via Airbnb and asked the hotel for checkout on the intervening night of January 7-8.

A hotel staffer said that Seth had asked for a taxi to go back to Bengaluru. Although the staffer suggested that flying back would be a more efficient option, she persistently stuck to wanting a taxi. The hotel, later, arranged a local taxi for her.

Nidhin Valsan, North Goa SP, noted that a police team reached the hotel at around 11 am after being informed about the bloodstain.

Valsan said that they examined the CCTV footage and found Seth to be allegedly leaving the service apartment without her son.

Naik said that he had even contacted the taxi driver and asked him to speak with Seth. As Naik questioned her, she claimed that she left her son at a friend’s house in Fatorda and even provided him with details about the house. The address, however, was later found to be fake.

The next time Naik called the taxi driver, he conversed with him in Konkani and slyly asked him to visit a nearby police station without Seth’s knowledge. Reportedly, by that time, the taxi was in the Chitradurga district.

Following Naik’s instructions, the taxi driver apparently drove to the Aimangala police station without raising any suspicion on Seth’s part.

Upon reaching the station, a police officer checked the car, only to find the child’s body in a bag. Though the motive behind the murder is yet to be ascertained, but indeed, Naik’s intuitions about the body turned out to be true.

The child’s body has been sent for post-mortem, an official involved in the probe said.

Sources said that it is being investigated whether the motive behind the murder was Seth’s tension over her marital separation.

The officer said that Seth’s husband, Venkat Raman, — who is currently in Indonesia — has been informed and he is coming back to India.

The transit remand process is underway, he added. Soon after, she will be brought to Goa and produced before a court for further investigation.

The SP noted that the crime scene will be recreated once Seth is brought back to Goa.

Police have booked Seth under Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 302 and 201.

WHO IS SUCHANA SETH?

Suchana Seth is the founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Mindful AI Labs. Her LinkedIn profile, describes her as an “AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams, and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs.”

Being a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society, a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University and a research fellow at Raman Research Institute, Seth “also holds patents in natural language processing.”

Apart from this, she is also “on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List”, her LinkedIn bio says.