Chitradurga: The boy was smothered to death, said a senior doctor in Chitradurga citing the postmortem report of the four-year-old who was allegedly killed by his mother at a service apartment in Goa.
Suchana Seth, the chief executive officer (CEO) of an artificial intelligence start-up, was apprehended in Chitradurga in Karnataka 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.
“He (the child) 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 had resolved in the child,” Hiriyur Taluk Hospital’s administrative officer Dr Kumar Naik said Tuesday.
“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.
“We cannot say the exact time but it has been 36 hours since his death,” Naik said.
Meanwhile, the body of the victim child was brought to Bengaluru Wednesday from Chitradurga.
The child will be cremated later in the day at Rajaji Nagar in Bengaluru.
The victim’s father Venkat Raman brought the body to an apartment here where the initial rituals took place. The cremation will be held at Harishchandra Ghat.
Raman, who hails from Kerala and settled in Indonesia reached Hiriyur in Chitradurga Tueday night and took possession of the body of his son after postmortem.
It can be mentioned here that the incident came to light after the housekeeping staff found blood stains in the room Suchana had stayed in.
After checking out, the accused had come out with a big suitcase to head for Bengaluru. As she was boarding the taxi, the hotel staff who had seen her son, enquired about the child.
The accused informed the staff that he had been sent to her relative’s place and left the hotel.
However, the hotel staff got suspicious after housekeeping staff found blood stains in her room and called the police.
After getting the information from the hotel, the Goa Police got the contact number of the taxi driver and asked him to stop as soon as he spotted a police station on the National Highway.
Accordingly, the taxi driver stopped the vehicle near Imangala Police Station. The Goa Police had briefed their Karnataka counterparts about the development. The police found the body of the child in the trunk of the car inside the suitcase.
The body was shifted to the mortuary and the accused was taken into custody, police sources said.
Police sources also stated that initially, Suchana maintained that her son was with a friend and gave cops his address as well. The Goa cops had found that the address was fake.
Notably, 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 start-ups 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 and audits’ and ‘Responsible AI Strategy’.
A postgraduate from the University of Calcutta, and a research fellow from Raman Research Institute (RRI), Seth had spent two years at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
PTI
