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(Trigger warning: Mentions of violence)
A 39-year-old CEO of an AI startup based out of Bengaluru has been arrested by the Calangute Police in Goa for allegedly murdering her four-year-old son at a service apartment in Candolim, North Goa.
The accused, Suchana Seth, who is reportedly the co-founder of AI startup Mindful AI Labs, was arrested in Karnataka's Chitradurga while she was fleeing with the body of her son in a taxi, as per Calangute Police.
What happened? Seth checked into a service apartment in Candolim on Saturday, 6 January, and stayed there till Monday, 8 January, Calangute Police told The Quint.
"When she was checking out on 8 January, her son was not seen with her. She told the hotel management that she wanted a taxi back to Bengaluru. The staff told her it would be cheaper to book a flight back, but she insisted on getting a taxi," an official at Calangute police station told The Quint.
Hotel staff raised suspicion: After she left in the cab, the hotel staff went to her room to clean – and they found bloodstains in the bathroom, the police said.
"The hotel staff informed us about this, and we contacted the driver who was taking her to Bengaluru. We asked the driver to give the phone to her. When we asked her where her son was, she said that he was at a friend's house in Goa and that she would come back to pick him up."Calangute Police
However, the address of the 'friend' that she gave the police turned out to be fake.
'Child's Body Found in Her Bag': Police
The Calangute Police then told the taxi driver to take her to the nearest police station in Karnataka's Chitradurga. When the police checked her luggage, her son's body was found in one of the two bags she was carrying.
The Calangute Police further said that she was separated from her husband over a family dispute and that this could be the motive for the crime.
Speaking to the media on Tuesday, 9 January, Nidhin Valsan, the North Goa Superintendent of Police said that the accused is married to a Keralite.
"Prima facie, our investigating officers spoke to the woman, and she said that the relationship she shares with her husband is not good. Their divorce proceedings are almost finalised. And there was a court order because of which she was very unhappy. We have to read the court order to understand what it was about. The interrogation is still going on. The motive is still not confirmed," he said.
He added that the husband is not in the country and he has been informed of the incident.
What are the charges? Seth has been arrested under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 8 of the Goa Children's Act. The child's body has been sent for postmortem examination, and further investigation is underway.
"How the boy was murdered can only be ascertained after the postmortem, which is being done at the government hospital in Chitradurga," the SP said.
'AI Expert, Harvard Fellow'
As per the LinkedIn page of Mindful AI Labs, Suchana Seth was named in the '100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List' of 2021.
Her LinkedIn bio describes her as an AI ethics expert and a data scientist "with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams, and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs."
"She has been a Mozilla Fellow at Data and Society, a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University, and a research fellow at the Raman Research Institute. She also holds patents in natural language processing," her bio reads.
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