A traffic jam at Goa’s Chorla Ghat due to an accident proved to be a blessing in disguise for police in reaching Suchana Seth– the CEO of startup company Mindful AI Lab– in time before she could dispose of her son’s body. Seth was arrested in Karnataka’s Chitradurga on Monday, while she was trying to flee from North Goa with her four-year-old son’s body stuffed in a bag.
A truck had overturned, creating a bottleneck and a four-hour jam at Chorla Ghat– located at the intersection of the borders of Goa, Karnataka and Maharashtra– which delayed Seth’s journey.
Had she reached Bengaluru, it would have been difficult to get the body of the child, NDTV reported police sources as saying.
Suchana was apprehended while she was on her way from Goa to Bengaluru, and her son’s body was found in a suitcase. She was arrested at the directions of the Goa Police. A court in Goa on Tuesday remanded Suchana Seth in police custody for six days.
Royjohn D’Souza, the cab driver from North Goa’s Anjuna, who drove Seth from Hotel Sol Banyan Grande in Candolim to the police station in Chitradurga, was also instrumental in her arrest.
D’Souza got an urgent call from the hotel at 11 pm on January 7 to take Seth to Bengaluru, according to a report by Indian Express.
“My co-driver and I reached the parking area. She said she was travelling alone and told me to put a red trolley bag in the boot. The suitcase was unusually heavy, but I didn’t think much of it,” he told IE.
D’Souza recalled that during the journey, Seth was completely silent, barring one time when she asked if he wanted to drink water.
For the next few hours, he continued to drive non-stop, till he got a call from a Calangute police inspector around 11 am.
“The police inspector asked me if the passenger I was ferrying was alone or if a child was with her. The officer was talking in Konkani, and I figured that she could not understand our conversation. I told him she was alone. He said police had found bloodstains in her hotel room and they had a suspicion about her. Then, I passed the phone to her and said that someone wanted to speak to her. The officer spoke to her for a couple of minutes. She mentioned an address. Besides that, she didn’t react much and did not seem to be in any sort of panic,” D’Souza said.
Police later again called D’Souza after confirming that the address Seth provided about her son’s whereabouts was fake and directed him to “immediately drive to the nearest police station”.
Here cab driver’s presence of mind came into play. He reportedly Googled the nearest police station discreetly. The map showed one at a distance of 150 km, he said.
“That would have been too far. So, I told her that my co-driver and I needed to use a washroom, and stopped the car,” he said.
Along the roadside, the duo found a restaurant, where the watchman informed them that the Aimangala police station in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district was just 500 metres away.
He then called Goa police and kept them on standby while he drove to the police station.
D’Souza said Seth asked him why he had stopped the car outside the police station and he made an excuse before handing over his phone to the station-in-charge.
“The police officers of both states then coordinated and, in the next 10 minutes, the police checked the luggage and found the body of her son. I didn’t have time to process what was happening and just did what the police asked. She did not show any emotion while the police were conducting the check,” he said.
Seth has been booked under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 302 (murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence), and also under the Goa Children’s Act.
What Did Post Mortem Report Say?
Meanwhile, the body of a 4-year-old boy was brought to Bengaluru after a post-mortem on Wednesday from Chitradurga and the child was cremated later in the day.
The victim’s father Venkat Raman, who hails from Kerala and settled in Indonesia reached Hiriyur in Chitradurga on Tuesday night and took possession of the body of his son after postmortem.
Postmortem had revealed the child was smothered to death.
“He was strangled to death or what we call smothering. Either a cloth or a pillow was used. The child died due to strangulation. It doesn’t look like the child was strangulated using hands. It looks like a pillow or some other material was used. The Rigor mortis (postmortem muscle stiffness) had resolved in the child,” Hiriyur Taluk Hospital’s administrative officer Dr Kumar Naik told reporters.
Naik said there was no blood loss or struggle marks on the body.
Who Is Suchana Seth?
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 labs.
“She is on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List. She has been a Mozilla Fellow at Data & 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,” the profile read.
Seth is an expert in ‘AI Ethics Advisory & Audits’ and ‘Responsible AI Strategy’. A postgraduate from the University of Calcutta, and a research fellow from Raman Research Institute (RRI) and spent two years at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Seth hails from West Bengal and has been living in Bengaluru, while her husband is from Kerala.
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