AI CEO Arrested After Young Son's Body Found in Suitcase: Cops

The CEO of an Indian artificial intelligence startup was arrested Monday after her 4-year-old son's body was found in a suitcase in the trunk of a taxi she was riding in. Suchana Seth, 39, leads the Mindful AI Lab and was in 2021 listed as one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (though she's apparently since been removed from the list). On Saturday, she checked into a hotel in a popular beach area in Goa with her son. Two days later, she checked out without him, and requested a taxi to return her home to Bengaluru, despite it being 350 miles away, CBS News reports.

Hotel staff cleaning the apartment she'd been staying in found blood stains on the floor and alerted police, who were able to contact the taxi driver and ask him to take Seth to a police station. He did so, and the child's body was found. Police say Seth and her husband separated in 2020 and are in the final stages of divorcing, and Seth was unhappy about being required to take her son to visit his father on Sundays, the Times of India reports. A postmortem exam found the child was fatally smothered, and police say Seth killed him and then cut her wrist using a pair of scissors in a failed attempt at taking her own life, causing the blood on the floor, the Hindustan Times reports. But she told police the boy died suddenly and unexpectedly during their trip. (More India stories.)