Panaji: In the room where the CEO of a start-up is accused of killing her four-year-old son, empty bottles of a cough syrup were discovered by the Goa police, an official said today. This suggests that the mother may have given her son a heavy dose of the medication and that the murder was premeditated.
Officials said the child was smothered to death with a pillow or cloth, according to the results of the postmortem.
The accused, Suchana Seth, is accused of killing her son in the Candolim apartment in Goa, stuffing the body into a bag and bringing it to nearby Karnataka in a taxi, according to the police.
She was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday night and brought to Goa on Tuesday.
A senior police officer told Press Trust of India that during the inspection of the service apartment room where the woman stayed, they found two empty bottles (one big and another small) of a 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 if the woman gave a heavy dose of cough syrup to the child before putting him to death,” the official said.
Enquiries with the service apartment staff revealed the woman had asked them to buy a small bottle of a cough syrup claiming she was having 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.
After arriving at the service apartment on January 6 and staying there until January 8, Suchana Seth took a taxi to Bengaluru.
She was placed in police custody for six days after being arrested, according to a court in Mapusa, Goa, on Tuesday.
Tuesday night, the child’s father, Venkat Raman, arrived in Hiriyur, Chitradurga, from Jakarta, Indonesia, and collected his son’s body following a postmortem.
“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.
Suchana 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.
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