39-year-old Suchana Seth is based out of Bengaluru and is the CEO of a company named MindfulAI. According to Mint, she was one of the top ‘100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021’. Her LinkedIn profile claims that she 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”. On paper, she ticks all the boxes of a member of Bengaluru’s startup culture. However, her reality is far from it.
According to TOI, Suchana Seth has been accused of murdering her 4-year-old son in Goa. She was staying at an apartment in North Goa’s Candolim where she allegedly committed the murder, stuffed her son’s body inside a bag, left the apartment, caught a cab and was headed towards Bengaluru. Here’s what happened.
On January 6, she checked into a service apartment at Hotel Sol Banyan Grande in Candolim, reported Indian Express. On the night of January 7, she informed the hotel staff that she would be checking out and requested them to arrange a cab for her to Bengaluru. The hotel staff advised her to take a flight instead because that would be cheaper. The cab would cost her Rs 30,000. But at 1.30 AM, she checked out of the hotel.
At 10 AM, the hotel staff were in her room to clean it when they found bloodstains. They immediately informed Calangute police who came to the hotel, checked CCTV footage and found that the woman hadn’t left the hotel with her son. A cop called up the driver and through him, spoke to the woman asking about the whereabouts of her son. Suchana claimed that she had left her son with a friend and gave him an address. The police cross-checked and found that the address was fake.
The police called the cab driver again but this time, they spoke to him in Konkani so the accused wouldn’t get suspicious. The driver was asked to drive to a nearby police station. And so, he drove to Aimangla police station in Chitradurga district of Karnataka, reported TOI. When the cops checked her bag, they found the body of her son inside it.
While the exact motive behind the murder is not known, it has been found out that Suchana was in the middle of divorce proceedings with her husband and there was an ongoing custody battle for her son. She is currently booked under IPC sections 302 (murder), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) and section 8 of The Goa Children’s Act.
What a shocking incident!