Cough syrup angle emerges as Bengaluru CEO accused of murdering 4-year-old son

Cough syrup angle emerged in the murder of the four-year-old boy killed by his mother, Suchana Seth, CEO of a Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Goa Police said on Wednesday. 

They said some two empty cough syrup bottles were found in the room of the accused woman, sources with the Goa Police told India Today. One of the bottles was brought by Suchana, while the other was provided by the hotel staff upon her request.

Police also believed the finding of cough syrups would add weight to the postmortem reports suggesting the child's body did not bear any struggle marks. Police sources told PTI that 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.

The four-year old boy allegedly killed by his mother was cremated in the Karnataka capital Bengaluru on Wednesday as it emerged in investigations by the Goa police that it may have been a pre-planned murder.

A teary-eyed Venkat Raman, the estranged husband of the 39-year-old Suchana Seth, hailing from West Bengal, performed the last rites at Harishchandra Ghat at Rajaji Nagar in Bengaluru.

The post-mortem has revealed the child was smothered to death either with a cloth or a pillow, according to officials.

Seth, who was reportedly upset with the ongoing divorce proceedings with her husband, allegedly killed her son in the apartment at Candolim in Goa and stuffed the body in a bag before taking it to neighbouring Karnataka in a taxi, police said.

Seth, who was on her way to Bengaluru, was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday night on the instructions of Goa police and brought to Goa on Tuesday.

A senior police officer told PTI 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 of the woman giving 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 a cough, he said, adding the bigger bottle might have been carried by her.

“It looks like a pre-planned murder,” the official said.

“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.

Seth checked into the service apartment on January 6 and stayed there till January 8 before leaving for Bengaluru in a taxi.

Following her arrest, a court in Mapusa town of Goa on Tuesday remanded her in police custody for six days.

The child’s father, Venkat Raman, who hails from Kerala but is now based in Indonesia, reached Hiriyur in Chitradurga district on Tuesday night and took possession of his son’s body after the post-mortem.

“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,” Hiriyur Taluk Hospital’s administrative officer Dr Kumar Naik told reporters.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Seth 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. 

With inputs from PTI

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