Child Allegedly Killed By CEO Mother Cremated, Pre-Planned Murder Suspected

The four-year-old boy who was allegedly murdered by his mother, the CEO of a Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, was cremated in the Karnataka capital on Wednesday, as Goa police investigations revealed that it may have been a pre-planned murder.

Venkat Raman, the estranged husband of Suchana Seth, 39, from West Bengal, performed the last rites at Harishchandra Ghat in Rajaji Nagar here.

Meanwhile, Goa police discovered two empty bottles of cough syrup in the room where the CEO of Mindful AI allegedly killed the boy, indicating she may have given him a high dose of the medicine and that it was a pre-planned murder, according to an official.

According to officials, the child was smothered to death with a cloth or a pillow, as revealed by the post-mortem.

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Seth, who was reportedly upset with her husband’s ongoing divorce proceedings, allegedly killed her son in Candolim, Goa, and stuffed the body in a bag before taking it to neighbouring Karnataka in a taxi, according to police.

Seth, who was on her way to Bengaluru, was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday night on the instructions of Goa police and brought to Goa on Tuesday.

A senior police officer told PTI that during the inspection of the service apartment room where the woman stayed, they found two empty bottles (one big and another small) of cough syrup.

“The post-mortem conducted on the body has indicated the possibility that the child might have been smothered to death and there were no signs of struggle,” he said.

“We are examining the possibility of the woman giving a heavy dose of cough syrup to the child before putting him to death,” the official said.

Inquiries with the service apartment staff revealed the woman had asked them to buy a small bottle of cough syrup claiming she was having a cough, he said, adding the bigger bottle might have been carried by her.

“It looks like a pre-planned murder,” the official said.

According to police sources, the accused has denied her involvement in the crime during the interrogation and claimed the child was already dead when she got up from sleep.

“We don’t buy her theory. Further investigation will reveal the motive behind killing the child. As of now, we know that she and her husband were estranged because of which she might have done this,” a senior police official said.

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Seth checked into the service apartment on 6 January and stayed until 8 January before taking a taxi to Bengaluru.

Following her arrest, a court in Goa’s Mapusa town remanded her in police custody for six days on Tuesday.

Venkat Raman, the child’s father, who is from Kerala but now lives in Indonesia, arrived in Hiriyur in the Chitradurga district on Tuesday night and took possession of his son’s body following the post-mortem.

“He was strangled to death, also known as smothering.” A pillow or a cloth was used. The child died as a result of strangulation. It does not appear that the child was strangled with his or her hands. “It appears that a pillow or some other material was used,” Dr Kumar Naik, administrative officer at Hiriyur Taluk Hospital, told reporters.

Seth is an AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience mentoring data science teams and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Source: PTI