Suchana Seth, accused of killing 4-yr-old son, was upset about custody battle: Police
North Goa SP Nidhin Valsan said Suchana Seth’s husband, who was currently in Indonesia, has been informed about the case, and asked to record his statement
PANAJI: Suchana Seth, the 39-year-old founder of a tech startup arrested on Monday on charges of killing her four-year-old son at a Goa hotel, was upset about an adverse court ruling in connection with her child’s custody, a Goa police officer said on Tuesday.
Seth, chief executive officer of AI Mindful Lab, was arrested in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district 400km from the Goa hotel with the body of her four-year-old stuffed into one of her luggage.
“She has said that she was not on good terms with her husband and there is a divorce proceeding which is at the final stages. She said there was a recent court order concerning the custody of the child which she was not happy with,” North Goa superintendent of police Nidhin Valsan said, citing the initial round of questioning of the woman.
Valsan said her husband, who was in Indonesia, had been told to come to Goa to record his statement in connection with his son’s murder
Valsan said police teams were yet to piece together the sequence of events that led to the little boy’s murder.
Suchana Seth, who describes herself as a data scientist and an artificial intelligence ethics expert on her LinkedIn page, flew from Bengaluru to Goa with her son on January 6 and checked into the Sol Banyan Grande hotel in North Goa’s Candolim. Her reservation was till January 10.
Valsan said the child may have died on January 7.
The officer said Suchana Seth called the front desk past midnight and called them to book her a cab that could take her home to Bengaluru.
The hotel staff suggested that she travel by flight. It would have been cheaper and faster. Bengaluru was about 600km away and it would take about 11 hours by road. There were many flights including some in the morning that she could take.
“But she insisted she wanted to go by taxi. The hotel arranged an Innova taxi and she left the hotel at about 1am on January 8 (night intervening Sunday and Monday),” Valsan said. Her son wasn’t with her when she left.
As the hotel staffers learnt later, the little boy was in one of the bags that she took back.
The hotel’s cleaning staff raised an alarm the following morning after they spotted blood stains in the room.
The Calangute police station officers questioned the hotel staff who confirmed her suspicious behaviour the previous night. A police officer phoned Seth to enquire about her son’s whereabouts.
“She initially told the police she had left her son with a friend at Margao in south Goa. But the address that she gave was on verification found to be fake. We called the cab driver and told him to drive to the nearest police station. She was arrested at the Aimangala police station of Karnataka Police in Chitradurga district,” a police officer said.
“The child’s body was found stuffed in a luggage bag following which Seth was detained by the Aimangala police,” Valsan said.
“We have produced Seth before a local magistrate and secured a transit remand. She is being brought to Goa for interrogation. The body of the child is preserved at a government hospital in Chitradurga where the postmortem will be conducted,” Valsan added.
The Calangute police have been told by their Karnataka counterparts that the child may have been smothered or strangled. It is not clear if the blood stains in the room were of Seth or her child.
Seth earlier worked in the USA where she spent two years at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
