Murder case in Goa: Police have found evidence suggesting that Suchana Seth pre-planned her son's murder.
Panaji:
Goa police have found empty bottles of cough syrup in a room where the CEO of a start-up allegedly killed her four-year-old son, indicating that she may have given him a heavy dose of the drug and it was premature. -planned murder, an official said today.
The post-mortem revealed that the child was smothered to death with a cloth or a pillow, officials said.
The accused woman, Suchana Seth, allegedly killed her son at the apartment in Goa's Candolim and stuffed the body in a bag before taking it in a taxi to neighboring Karnataka, police said.
She was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday evening and brought to Goa on Tuesday.
A senior police officer told Press Trust of India that during the inspection of the room of the serviced apartment where the woman was staying, they found two empty bottles (one large and one small) of cough syrup.
“The post-mortem conducted on the body has indicated the possibility that the child could have been smothered and there were no signs of struggle,” he said.
“We are investigating the possibility that the woman gave the child a heavy dose of cough syrup before putting him to death,” the official said.
Inquiries with the staff at the serviced apartment revealed that the woman had asked them to buy a small bottle of cough syrup, claiming that she had a cough, he said, adding that the larger bottle might have been carried by her.
“It looks like a pre-planned murder,” the official said.
According to police sources, during interrogation the suspect denied her involvement in the crime and claimed that the child was already dead when she woke up from her sleep.
“We do not believe her theory. Further investigation will reveal the motive behind the child's murder. As of now, we know that she and her husband were estranged from each other, which could have caused her to do this,” a senior police official said.
Suchana Seth checked into the serviced apartment on January 6 and stayed there till January 8 before leaving for Bengaluru in a taxi.
Following her arrest, a court in Mapusa city of Goa remanded her to six-day custody on Tuesday.
The child's father Venkat Raman, who was in Jakarta (Indonesia), reached Hiriyur in Chitradurga on Tuesday evening and took possession of his son's body after the post-mortem.
“He was strangled or what we call suffocation. A cloth or a pillow was used. The child died of strangulation. It does not appear that the child was strangled with the hands. It resembles a pillow or other material. Rigor mortis (post-mortem muscle stiffness) had disappeared in the child,” Hiriyur Taluk Hospital administrative officer Dr Kumar Naik told reporters.
Suchana Seth is the CEO of 'The Mindful AI Lab' and according to her LinkedIn profile, 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 laboratories.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
