A 39-year-old woman named Suchana Seth has been arrested for allegedly killing her 4-year-old son by smothering him on 8th January 2024. According to Seth's LinkedIn page, she is the CEO of the start-up Mindful AI Lab and was among the top '100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021'. Ms Seth had checked into a service apartment number called ‘Sol Banyan Grande’ in north Goa's Candolim on 6th January 2024 with her son. She checked out 2 days later alone but with an unusually heavy large bag. According to the reports, Ms Seth had requested the hotel to book her a cab to Bangalore. Because the distance between Goa & Bangalore is more than 650 km and takes more than 12 hours by road, the hotel staff suggested she take a flight instead but she adamantly refused. After her checkout, when the housekeeping staff went to clean her room to clean it, they found red stains. Assuming them to be blood, the hotel immediately informed the police. The Goa Police reached the hotel, tracked down the cab and tried to contact the woman through the cab driver. They asked her about her son, to which Ms Seth replied that her son was staying at a friend's place in Margao town in South Goa. The police immediately took the help of Fatorda Police near Margao and came to know that the address given by her was fake. The police contacted the cab driver again and to avoid alerting or panicking Ms Seth, they spoke to the driver in Konkani. The police asked the driver to take the car to a police station in Karnataka's Chitradurga district, approximately 200 km from Bengaluru. When the local police checked Ms Seth’s luggage, they found the dead body of her 4-year-old son. According to the police, Ms. Seth allegedly tried to end her own life after committing a horrendous crime. She tried to commit suicide by cutting off her left wrist with a sharp object and the blood stains found in the room were hers. Ms Seth's relationship with her husband and the father of her son was not good. The couple is in the final stages of their divorce and there is some court order due to which Ms Seth was unhappy. However, the police said that the court order that left Ms Seth ‘unhappy’ is not yet known. They have announced that the details about Ms Seth’s relationship and divorce with her husband have yet to be verified by them and that the investigation is still ongoing. The 4-year-old boy’s father, who is a businessman from Kerala was in Indonesia at the time of the murder and has been asked to return to India immediately. In their statement, the police informed that the child’s body has been placed in the morgue of Karnataka government hospital and soon a post-mortem will be carried out to determine the cause of his death. To investigate the case properly, the police have also collected the hotel’s CCTV footage and deployed a forensics team on-site to gather more evidence. The police have praised the alertness of the hotel staff and the calmness of the cab driver. They have registered a case against Ms Seth under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 302 (murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence), and also under the Goa Children's Act. The Goa Court has sent her to police custody for 6 days.

Tags

• mother
• son
• goa
• bengaluru

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