The unfortunate news of the murder of a 4-year-old boy has been circulating across media globally for over a week.
As per the reports, Bengaluru-based, Suchana Seth, founder and CEO of The Mindful AI Lab is accused of killing her son in Candolim, North Goa, and had visited Goa a week before the alleged murder.
According to The Indian Express, Seth came to Goa on New Year’s Eve and stayed there till January 4 in South Goa. Then she fled back to Karnataka and returned to Goa on January 6 and checked into Hotel Sol Banyan Grande in North Goa’s Candolim where the child was allegedly murdered.
Suchana packed the corpse of the child in a bag and tried to flee back to Bengaluru but was caught by the police midway in Chitradurga, Karnataka on January 8.
She has been booked by Calangute, Goa police under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 302 (murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence), and also under the Goa Children’s Act.
Suchana was brought back to Goa and a court in Mapusa town had remanded her in police custody for six days. A senior official said she has been completely non-cooperative and continues to deny she killed her son.
“She has been confirming all other parts, including that she carried the child’s corpse in a bag. But she refuses to confess that she killed him. She repeatedly claims her husband is responsible for the child’s death,” The senior official said.
According to the police, the motive behind killing her son could be that she did not want her estranged husband, Venkat Raman to meet her son.
“On December 31 (Sunday) when she arrived in Goa, she told her husband that their son was unwell, so she could not send him to meet his father. The consecutive visits to Goa over the two weekends suggest that she did not want her husband to meet their son as mandated by the court,” an officer was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.
Seth was produced before Goa Children’s Court after her initial remand of six days expired. The Calangute Police sought the extension of her custody as the investigation is yet to conclude.
On 11 January, Police recovered a five-sentence note purportedly written by Seth who allegedly killed his four-year-old son in a Goa hotel room. The investigators said that it could be the key to unlock the motive behind the crime.
Earlier, in her statement to the Goa police, Suchana had denied killing her son. She said that when she fell asleep, her son was alive, but he was dead when she woke up.
Seth’s police remand, meanwhile, was extended by a children’s court in Panaji. She was produced in the court after her six-day police custody ended.
The Beef between Suchana and Raman
Raman, on Saturday, recorded his statement at Goa’s Calangute police station, where he was also confronted with Suchana Seth.
Raman claimed that he met his son last on December 10, and since then Suchana never allowed him to meet his son again – surpassing the five Sundays in violation of the court’s order.
Raman said that he did not know the reason for the killing of the child and that only Suchana could tell why she committed the crime.
According to the reports, Raman’s lawyer told reporters that the trigger for the offense was just a guess, it might be that Suchana did not want Raman to meet their son or have any emotional bond with him.
It is worth noting that a custody battle for the child between Suchana and Raman was underway for the past year in a Bengaluru family court.
Suchana Seth – A Brief Background
Suchana Seth hails from Bengal was married to Venkat Raman from Kerala in 2010, and filed for divorce eight years later. Their child was born in 2019 and followed by the divorce proceedings in 2020, the court allowed Raman to meet his son on Sundays.
Suchana is a well-qualified AI expert with around 12 years of experience as a data scientist, and the founder of AI startup ‘The Mindful AI Lab’. She has worked on several Artificial Intelligence (AI) and internet-related projects with Harvard University according to her LinkedIn profile (now deleted).
