Indian AI company chief charged with murder of 4-year-old son

Police discover body of four-year-old in woman’s luggage

Police say that they believe they know the identity of the victim (Peter Byrne/PA) (PA Archive)

The chief executive of an Indian artificial intelligence (AI) company has been arrested after being accused of killing her four-year-old son at an Airbnb property in the tourist state of Goa.

Suchana Seth, the co-founder of startup Mindful AI Lab, was arrested on Monday while she was returning to Bengaluru city allegedly with the body of her son in her luggage.

The 39-year-old woman checked into a rented service apartment at Candolim in North Goa on 6 January along with her son, the local police said.

During the early hours of 8 January, Ms Seth asked the apartment staff to arrange for a taxi to travel over 600km by road from Goa to Bengaluru in Karnataka state.

The next morning the apartment staff raised an alarm after spotting red stains in the room, which they assumed was blood, North Goa superintendent of police Nidhin Valsan said in a press conference on Tuesday.

The management of the apartment informed the local police, who rushed to the spot and prima facie found the stains to be of blood.

When asked about the stains over call, she claimed that it was due to her menstrual cycle and that she had left her son in Margao town with a friend, according to the police.

The police asked the driver of the taxi to take the vehicle to the nearest police station without Ms Seth’s knowledge after the address provided by her turned out to be fake.

Upon inspection at a police station in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district, the corpse of the boy was discovered in the luggage bag.

She was arrested eight hours into her journey and charged with murder. Ms Seth was later brought back to Goa to be presented before the district court.

The child's body was left behind in Chitradurga district for autopsy, the police said.

Authorities were trying to ascertain the motive behind the crime.

Ms Seth belongs to India’s eastern state of West Bengal and is married to a man from the southern state of Kerala. Her estranged husband Venkat Raman lives in Jakarta and has been asked to return to India, the police added.

Ms Seth’s LinkedIn profile suggests she is an AI ethics expert and data scientist.