Who is Suchana Seth — start-up CEO arrested over 4-year-old son’s murder in Goa?

Suchana Seth, CEO of Mindful AI Lab, was arrested by Goa Police from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Sunday night. The motive behind the killing was not yet known.

Suchana Seth, a 39-year-old chief executive officer of an artificial intelligence start-up company, was arrested for allegedly killing her four-year-old son in Goa.

Suchana Seth was arrested by the Goa Police from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Sunday night, the police said, adding the motive behind the killing was not yet known.

Who is Suchana Seth?

According to Suchana Seth’s LinkedIn page, she is the CEO of start-up Mindful AI Lab and was among the top ‘100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021’.

Her profile description says “Suchana is an 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”.

Suchana Seth has been 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, it says.

She also holds patents in natural language processing.

What we know about the case

Suchana Seth checked into a rented service apartment in North Goa’s Candolim on January 6 along with her son, Calangute police station inspector Paresh Naik said.

After staying there for a couple of days, Seth told the apartment staff that she wanted to go to Bengaluru for some work and asked them to arrange for a taxi, Naik said.

The staff suggested that she could take a flight to Bengaluru which would be a cheaper option rather than hiring a taxi which is an expensive proposition, the cop said.

The woman insisted that she would travel by taxi only, and a vehicle was arranged on January 8 on which she left for Bengaluru early morning.

Later, when the apartment staff went to clean the room in which she stayed, they found blood stains on a towel, he said. The management of the apartment immediately informed the Calangute Police.

The staff also told the police that Seth’s four-year-old son was not seen with her when she left the apartment and she was also carrying an unusually heavy bag, he said.

The police then called her and asked her about the blood stains and her “missing” son.

The woman replied that the blood stains were due to her monthly periods. She added that her son was with her friend in Margao town in South Goa and provided the address.

Naik said the police immediately took the help of Fatorda Police (near Margao) and came to know the address given by her was fake.

The inspector later spoke over the phone to the taxi driver, who was on way to Bengaluru and had reached Chitradurga district in Karnataka, to take the accused to the nearest police station.

The police in Chitradurga checked the woman’s bag in which they found the body of the child, Naik said.

A Calangute Police team then rushed to Chitradurga and obtained a transit remand of the accused, who was being brought to Goa.

Police have informed about the incident to the accused’s husband, Venkat Raman, who is currently in Jakarta, Naik added.