The 39-year-old chief executive officer of a startup artificial intelligence company is accused of murdering her 4-year-old son and stuffing his body into her luggage before setting off a series of red flags that led to her arrest, Indian police said Tuesday.
Suchana Seth, whose LinkedIn page indicates she studied at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, was arrested Monday night for the grisly crime, which allegedly occurred in southwest India.
Seth is said to have killed her son inside a hotel in the state of Goa, The Economic Times reported, citing cops. Police reportedly said the tech CEO, who founded The Mindful AI Lab four years ago, raised suspicions when she asked her hotel to arrange a taxi to drive her home to Bengaluru, which is approximately 14 hours away by car.
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Police said front desk staff at the hotel suggested she fly home instead, citing both the cost-effectiveness and convenience of traveling by air, but authorities said she insisted on traveling by road.
Noticeably absent from checkout was Seth’s young son, police said. That, plus housekeeping staff uncovering blood in the room, led the hotel to contact cops—launching a probe that ended with Seth’s arrest before she made it home, said the Goa police inspector Paresh Naik, according to Reuters.
Suchana Seth’s biography page on the website of her startup AI company.
Mindful AI LabNDTV reported that police called Seth’s taxi driver and demanded to speak with her. Once she was on the phone, they reportedly asked about her son, to which she replied that he was away with a friend—despite security footage never capturing the boy leaving the hotel room he was sharing with his mom.
Police said they quickly discovered the address Seth gave for her son’s whereabouts was fake, so they called the cab again. This time, police said they spoke to the driver in Konkani—the state language of Goa, which Seth purportedly doesn’t speak—to ask the driver to divert to the nearest police station, about 125 miles from Bengaluru.
There, police say they detained Seth after finding the body of her son inside a travel bag she’d been carrying.
Police did not say how Seth’s child was killed, nor did they state a definitive motive for the slaying. However, Seth’s divorce from her husband, an AI developer who was away in Indonesia, was cited by police as potentially playing a factor in the killing.
Photos and videos of Seth being escorted by police in Goa showed her wearing a black bag over her face.
The LinkedIn page belonging to Seth included links from news articles that praised her work in AI, including a news story that listed her as one of the top “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021.”
That page indicated she worked in the greater New York City area between 2016 and 2017, and in the Boston metro region from 2017-19, when she was studying at a Harvard affiliate.
