Suchana Seth was calm, did not say a word throughout the journey: Taxi driver

PTI, Jan 12, 2024, 12:13 PM IST

Suchana Seth, the CEO of an AI start-up arrested for allegedly killing her four-year-old son, was quiet throughout her journey from Goa to Karnataka in a taxi, said the driver of the vehicle on Friday.

Talking to reporters at Candolim in North Goa on Thursday, Ray John, the taxi driver who helped the police nab Seth, said she was calm and did not utter a single word during the entire trip that lasted more than 10 hours. Seth (39) was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday night while she was travelling in the taxi with her son’s body stuffed in a bag and brought to Goa on Tuesday. A court in Mapusa town remanded her in police custody for six days.

She is accused of killing the child in a Candolim-based service apartment in Goa. John said the service apartment staff booked his taxi for Seth. “When I reached the service apartment, she (Seth) asked me to carry her bag from the reception to the taxi. It was heavy,” the taxi driver said.

“I asked her whether we could remove some belongings from the bag to make it lighter. But she refused. We had to drag the bag to the boot of the car,” he said.

The driver said that the only time she spoke was when she asked him to get a bottle of water when they reached Bicholim town in North Goa.

John said when they were heading to Bengaluru on Monday, there was a huge traffic jam at Chorla ghat section on the Karnataka-Goa border. The police told him that it would take at least four hours to get the traffic cleared. “I exaggerated the time and told madam (Seth) that it would take six hours to clear the road and suggested that we could turn back and head to the airport. But she insisted on continuing by road,” said the driver, stressing that he felt something was off.

The taxi driver said he later received a call from the Goa police, alerting him that there was something suspicious about his passenger. “The Calangute police told me to search for a nearby police station and take her there. I tried searching on Google Maps and GPS but didn’t find any. I even looked for cops at toll plazas but there were none,” he said.

Alarmed by the call from the police, the taxi driver said he bought some more time under the pretext of stopping by a roadside restaurant. There he learnt that a police station was just 500 metres away. “We were one and a half hours away from Bengaluru. I drove to the Aiyamangala police station (in Chitradurga district of Karnataka), while a Calangute police official remained on line with me on the phone,” he said.

John said it took almost 15 minutes before the inspector concerned came out. “But madam was calm and was sitting in the car,” he said.

The police searched her bag and found the child’s body in it, said John. ”When police asked her whether it was her son. She calmly said ‘yes’,” he added. The accused has told the police that she and her husband were estranged and their divorce proceedings were currently underway, according to officials.

According to Seth’s LinkedIn page, she is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of start-up Mindful AI Lab and was among the top ‘100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics for 2021’.

She had checked into the service apartment in North Goa on January 6 along with her son. After staying there for two days, she informed the apartment staff that she wanted to go to Bengaluru for some work and asked them to arrange for a taxi, an official had said earlier. She was arrested during her taxi journey.

Meanwhile, the child’s father, who hails from Kerala but is now based in Indonesia, came to India and cremated his son.