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Bengaluru-based AI Start-Up CEO Suchana Seth arrested for 'killing' her 4-year-old son in Goa

by Trans World Features | @twfindia 09 Jan 2024, 08:14 am

Police have arrested the founder of a tech startup firm from Karnataka for allegedly murdering her 4-year-old son in Goa.

She was identified as 39-year-old Suchana Seth.

She is the co-founder of artificial intelligence start-up Mindful AI Labs.

According to reports, she was upset over an adverse court ruling in connection with her child’s custody.

Police reportedly arrested Seth from Karnataka’s Chitradurga district, nearly 400 km away from the Goa hotel, where the crime was allegedly committed, 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 told Hindustan Times, 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.

According to reports, Seth flew from Bengaluru to Goa with her son on January 6.

She checked into the Sol Banyan Grande hotel in Candolim.

Her hotel was reserved till January 10.

Valsan told Hindustan Times 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 woman was suggested by hotel staff to take a flight instead of going by cab, to which the woman denied and insisted that she wanted to go by cab.

“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 told the newspaper.

Her son was not with her when she departed from the hotel.

The cleaning staff of the hotel raised an alarm on the following morning when blood stains were spotted in the room.

Following the development, police reportedly phoned Seth to enquire about her son’s whereabouts.

A police officer told Hindustan Times: "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."

The child's body was found in a  luggage bag.

Who is Suchana Seth?

As per her LinkedIn profile, Seth 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.

Her profile claimed she is on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List.

It mentions her role as a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society, a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University, and a research fellow at the Raman Research Institute.

She is the CEO and founder of The Mindful AI Lab.

She is also holding a first-class M.Sc. degree in Physics from the University of Calcutta.

She specialises in Plasma Physics with Astrophysics.

Previously, she completed her BSc in Physics from Bhawanipur Education Society College in Kolkata.