Chitradurga: The four-year-old boy allegedly killed by his mother at a service apartment in Goa was smothered to death, said a senior doctor here on Tuesday citing the postmortem report. According to reports, the accused Suchana Seth committed the murder after the court granted her estranged husband visitation rights amid divorce proceedings.
"The child was strangled to death or what we call smothering. Either a cloth or a pillow was used. He 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 had resolved in the child," Hiriyur Taluk Hospital's administrative officer Dr Kumar Naik told reporters.
"Usually in India, rigor mortis resolves after 36 hours but in this child's case, there was no Rigor mortis. So, it has been more than 36 hours since his death," he said. Naik said there was no blood loss or struggle marks on the body.
(Rigor mortis is a postmortem change resulting in the stiffening of the body muscles due to chemical changes in their myofibrils. Rigor mortis helps in estimating the time since death.)
Suchana Seth, the chief executive officer (CEO) of an artificial intelligence start-up, was apprehended in Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday night while she was on her way from Goa to Bengaluru, and the boy's body was found in a suitcase. She was arrested on the directions of the Goa Police.
Motive
According to Goa police, Seth told them that she and her husband were estranged and their divorce proceedings were currently underway. She was dissatisfied with a court order that allowed her husband visitation rights to see their son every Sunday, reported India Today. The accused woman hails from West Bengal and has been living in Bengaluru, while her husband Venkat Raman is from Kerala. They have been living apart since 2020.
The father of the four-year-old boy returned to India from Jakarta on Tuesday evening on learning about his child's murder, police said. The man arrived at Chitradurga in Karnataka, and gave his consent to the local authorities to conduct a post-mortem on his son's body, they said.
The incident
The incident took place in a service apartment at Candolim in North Goa between January 6 and 8, police said. The woman had checked into the service apartment with her son on January 6. After staying there for two days, she left for Bengaluru in a taxi on January 8 morning. When the apartment staff went to clean the room in which she stayed, they found blood stains on a towel. The staff immediately informed the police and told them that she carried an unusually heavy bag, and her son was not seen with her, officials said.
The police in Goa contacted their counterparts in Chitradurga, who checked the woman's bag in which they found the body of the child. She was arrested there and later brought to Goa, where a court remanded her in police custody for six days, they said.
Suicide attempt
The woman also tried to commit suicide by cutting her left wrist with a sharp object after murdering the boy, a senior police official said. "The blood stains that were found on a towel in the service apartment were due to the slashing of her wrist," he said.
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.
A postgraduate from the University of Calcutta, and a research fellow from Raman Research Institute (RRI), she spent two years at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
(With PTI inputs.)
