The police also said they recovered a crumpled note from her that seemed to indicate she was upset over a court ruling on her boy's custody.
Published Jan 12, 2024 | 6:46 PM ⚊ Updated Jan 12, 2024 | 6:57 PM
File photo of Suchana Seth. (Supplied)
Goa Police sources have told South First that Suchana Seth — the Bengaluru CEO accused of killing her son — was not cooperating with the police investigation.
They noted that Friday, 12 January, was the fifth day of police custody for Seth.
The Calangute police in Goa are done with the spot mahajar (inspection) at the service apartment in Candolim where the CEO of an AI start-up allegedly smothered her four-year-old son to death, said the sources.
She is accused of then carrying her son’s body in a bag in a taxi. She was intercepted in the Chitradurga district of Karnataka as she was headed to Bengaluru in a taxi.
Murder accused Suchana Seth, CEO of an AI start-up in Bengaluru
The police had taken Seth to the service apartment — where the murder allegedly took place — to recreate the crime scene. However, they said she was not cooperating with them.
“She is not consistent with her statements. Initially, she said she would talk only after her lawyer came, and then she admitted to killing her son. However she later told the police she had not killed her son,” said the Goa Police sources.
The blood stains the police found in the apartment room were not her son’s but hers as she had attempted to die by suicide by cutting her wrist, the police sources added.
Since the cut was superficial, she did not bleed much and changed the plan to dump her son’s body elsewhere, the police indicated.
The viscera samples collected during the post-mortem examination of the four-year-old deceased boy at the Hiriyur taluk hospital in Chitradurga have been sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) in Goa for further documentation and establishing the cause of death, said the police sources.
The police suspect that Seth smothered her son to death using a pillow probably after feeding him an overdose of cough syrup to render him unconscious.
Meanwhile, chilling details have emerged with the statements of taxi driver Ray John, who drove Seth from Goa to Karnataka in his car. It was he who helped the police nab Seth, said the Goa Police.
Seth was quiet throughout her entire journey in the taxi, said John. He told reporters in Candolim in North Goa on Thursday that she was calm and did not utter a single word during the entire trip, which lasted more than 10 hours.
Seth was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday evening while she was travelling in the taxi with her son’s body stuffed in a bag, and brought to Goa on Tuesday. A court in Mapusa town remanded her in police custody for six days.
According to the police, Seth and her four-year-old son checked into the service apartment in Candolim’s Hotel Sol Banyan Grande, booking via Airbnb, on 6 January.
The killing is said to have occurred inside the service apartment on the intervening night of 7 and 8 January, even as Seth demanded an immediate checkout from the hotel, insisting on a taxi to head to Bengaluru.
John said the service apartment staff booked his taxi for Seth. “When I reached the service apartment, she (Seth) asked me to carry her bag from the reception to the taxi. It was heavy,” the taxi driver said.
“I asked her whether we could remove some belongings from the bag to make it lighter. But she refused. We had to drag the bag to the boot of the car,” said John.
The driver added that the only time Seth spoke was when she asked him to get a bottle of water when they reached Bicholim town in North Goa.
John said when they were heading to Bengaluru on 8 January, there was a huge traffic jam at the Chorla ghat section on the Karnataka-Goa border. The police told him that it would take at least four hours to get the traffic cleared.
“I exaggerated the time and told madam (Seth) that it would take six hours to clear the road and suggested that we could turn back and head to the airport. But she insisted on continuing by road,” said the driver, noting that this was when he felt something was off.
John said he later received a call from the Goa Police alerting him that there was something suspicious about his passenger.
“The Calangute police told me to search for a nearby police station and take her there. I tried searching on Google Maps and GPS but didn’t find any. I even looked for cops at toll plazas but there were none,” he said.
Alarmed by the call from the police, the taxi driver said he bought some more time by stopping by a roadside restaurant. There he learnt that a police station was just 500 metres away.
“We were one and a half hours away from Bengaluru. I drove to the Aiyamangala police station (in the Chitradurga district of Karnataka), while a Calangute police official remained online with me on the phone,” he said.
John said it took almost 15 minutes before the inspector concerned came out. “But madam was calm and was sitting in the car,” he said.
The police searched her bag and found the child’s body in it, said John. “When police asked her whether it was her son, she calmly said ‘yes’,” he added.
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”.
Suchana Seth and her husband Venkataraman in better times.
The cops also stumbled upon a crumpled note in her vanity bag, and a senior police official confirmed as much.
The note was written on a tissue paper with an eyeliner, the police sources said. The cops have also collected her handwriting samples to compare it with the note recovered.
“We would not like to disclose the content of the note but it indicates that she was upset over the custody of her child,” he said.
The note was not found in the bag where she had stuffed her son’s body after killing him, he said.
Meanwhile, the child’s father, who hails from Kerala but is now based in Indonesia, came to India and cremated his son.
The accused, who hails from West Bengal, has told the police that she and her husband were estranged, and their divorce proceedings were currently underway, according to officials.
Police said that a court had granted visitation rights to her husband Venkataraman which had not gone down well with the accused.
(With PTI inputs)
