The police reported that Suchana Seth, the CEO of a startup, allegedly attempted suicide after suffocating her four-year-old son in their apartment in Goa.

Investigators state that a 39-year-old CEO from a Bangalore AI startup suffocated her son and subsequently attempted suicide by cutting her left wrist with a sharp object.

Police announced on Tuesday that Suchana Seth, the 39-year-old CEO of Mindful AI Lab, an artificial intelligence startup, was arrested in Goa for allegedly murdering her four-year-old son and attempting suicide.

The police reported that she asphyxiated her son to death in a room at a service apartment in Candolim, Goa, and subsequently attempted suicide by slashing her left wrist with a sharp object.

On Monday night, Suchana Seth was arrested in Chitradurga, Karnataka, after reportedly killing her young son in Goa and traveling with the body to the neighboring state. She was brought back to Goa on Tuesday and was remanded to police custody for six days by a court in Mapusa town.

The Superintendent of Police (North Goa), Nidhin Valsan, mentioned that the accused has been charged by the Calangute police under Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 302 (murder) and 201 (destruction of evidence), along with a violation of the Goa Children’s Act.

The motive behind the murder is currently unknown.

Suchana Seth and her husband are estranged and in the process of getting a divorce. While she resides in Bengaluru, her husband is from Kerala.

According to Superintendent of Police Nidhin Valsan, Suchana has mentioned that she and her husband were estranged and going through divorce proceedings.

Her estranged husband, currently in Jakarta, Indonesia, has been informed about the incident by the police.

On January 6, Suchana checked into a rented service apartment at Candolim in North Goa with her son. After staying for two days, she informed the apartment staff that she needed to go to Bengaluru for work and requested them to arrange for a taxi.

A vehicle was arranged on January 8, and she left early in the morning. However, when the apartment staff later went to clean the room, they discovered bloodstains on a towel. The police were immediately notified.

The staff also reported that Suchana was carrying an unusually heavy bag, and her four-year-old son was not seen with her when she left the apartment.

Following the alert from Goa police, the police in Chitradurga checked Suchana Seth’s bag and found the child’s body inside.

The bloodstains found on a towel in the service apartment were attributed to the slashing of Suchana Seth’s wrist, according to the police.

Suchana Seth, originally from West Bengal, is identified as the CEO of the startup Mindful AI Lab, as per her LinkedIn profile. Her profile describes her as an AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams and scaling machine learning solutions in startups and industry research labs. She has held positions as 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. Additionally, she was recognized among the top ‘100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021.’