The chief executive officer of The Mindful AI Lab has been arrested after her four-year-old son's remains were found inside of her luggage in India.
Suchana Seth, 39, head of the Indian AI startup, was arrested in the southern Karnataka state on Monday after law enforcement contacted her taxi driver and told them to bring her to the police station.
Law enforcement has alleged that Seth murdered her son in a hotel room in Goa.
The Economic Times reports:Suchana Seth, the accused, had provided a Bengaluru address while checking into a hotel in Candolim. The hotel staff suggested flying back to Bengaluru, citing cost-effectiveness and convenience, but she insisted on travelling by road. The hotel arranged a local taxi for her.
The investigation began when the bloodstain was discovered around 11 am, prompting the police to review CCTV footage. The footage allegedly shows Suchana leaving the service apartment without her son.
Inspector Paresh Naik of Calangute police station contacted the taxi driver and questioned Suchana about her son when she claimed to have left him at a friend's house in Fatorda. However, the provided friend's address turned out to be fake.
When law enforcement searched her belongings in the taxi, her child's body was found stuffed inside her luggage.
An autopsy found that the young boy was smothered to death at least 36 hours prior.
According to a report from the Indian Express, "Dr Kumar Naik, a government doctor who conducted the post-mortem, said, 'The child was killed more than 36 hours earlier. He has been smothered or strangulated. There are no wounds or signs of struggle. There may be the use of a pillow or a wire.'"
A police officer told the paper that she had also attempted suicide.
“There was no murder weapon. She allegedly tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists using a pair of scissors. Blood samples have been collected and a DNA test will be done to verify this,” said the officer.
Superintendent of Police (North Goa) Nidhin Valsan told reporters, "What she has told us so far is that she and her husband were estranged and that they are currently undergoing divorce proceedings."
Seth is from West Bengal and has been living in Bengaluru, while her estranged husband lives in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The accused murderer studied at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Her LinkedIn profile says she was named one of the "100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021."
According to a report from Fox Business, her LinkedIn profile also lists her as a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
Harvard’s website said, "At Berkman, Suchana [was] studying ways to operationalize ethical machine learning and AI in the industry. Her interests include auditing algorithms for fairness, accountability and transparency in machine learning, monetizing AI ethically, security vulnerabilities specific to machine learning and AI systems, and the regulatory landscape for predictive algorithms."
