A Bengaluru CEO has allegedly killed her 4-year-old son in Goa, said police on Tuesday, adding that the 39-year-old woman travelled with the body to Karnataka, according to PTI reports.
Police informed the woman is a startup founder, Suchana Seth, who killed the boy in an apartment in Goa. She hired a taxi to carry the body and kept it inside a bag while travelling to Karnataka, the cops added.
They said the CEO has been arrested and charged with murder. The child’s body has been recovered by the cops, the report said.
She stayed in an apartment in North Goa’s Candolim, witnesses claimed. They said blood stains were seen in the house.
According to the police, though the exact motive for the murder is yet to be established, during preliminary interrogation the accused woman mentioned ‘estranged relationship’ with her husband as one of the reasons. They said the woman had checked-in to a luxury apartment in North Goa’s Candolim on Saturday with her son and checked out on Monday morning.
The incident was reported after one of the employees of the house-keeping staff went to clean the apartment on Monday and noticed some bloodstains, said an officer. The hotel management contacted Goa police, and a team from Calangute police station rushed to the spot.
“While reviewing CCTV footage, it was seen that the accused had left the hotel without her son and was carrying a bag. During investigation, the hotel staff said the woman had asked the receptionist to arrange a cab to take her to Bengaluru. The hotel staff had advised her to take a flight instead, since a cab would be expensive, but the accused insisted on taking a cab,” said the investigator.
The Goa Police contacted the cab driver and spoke to the accused over the phone, enquiring about her son. They asked the driver to take Seth to Aimangala police station without informing her.
“On the call, she claimed her son was with a friend in Fatorda in Goa. Finding her answers evasive and suspicious, the police asked the driver to take the cab to the nearest police station in Karnataka. At the police station in Chitradurga, Karnataka police found the body of the boy stuffed in her bag and detained her,” said a police officer.
Police said Seth, a data scientist, is the founder and CEO of an tech consultancy ‘The Mindful AI Lab’. According to her LinkedIn profile, Seth is an Artificial Intelligence ethics expert with 12 years of experience working in data science and the startup industry. The profile adds that she was on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List, and was a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.
