10 months ago
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The four-year-old son of the Bengaluru start-up founder Suchana Seth was smothered with a pillow and died of suffocation, doctors of Hiriyur Hospital said after preliminary examination of the body as it came for postmortem. The boy, who died in Goa, was taken to the Hiriyur Hospital mortuary, after his father returned from Indonesia. The child's mother has been arrested for the murder and is in police custody for questioning.
"The child was smothered," Dr Kumar Naik, who was in charge of the postmortem examination, told the media.
"He could have probably died after being suffocated by a pillow or some other object. The child doesn't seem like he was killed by strangulation using hands. The killing took place over 36 hours ago. His face and chest are swollen due to suffocation. And the child's nose was bleeding," he added.
The 39-year-old woman was caught from Karnataka's Chitradurga on Monday night while travelling with her son's body packed in a bag.
The police said she is believed to have killed her son in a service apartment in Goa's Candolim, where they checked in on January 6. Then she tried suicide by slashing her wrist, the police said.
But her moves thereafter have raised a number of questions.
Suchana Seth said she wanted a taxi for a 600-km journey to Bengaluru, brushing off the hotel authorities' suggestion that she take a flight. She told them her son was staying with a friend and gave an address that was later found to be fake.
The police are yet to zero-in on the motive for the murder. Suchana Seth, they said, is divorcing her husband and they had not parted on amicable terms.
The woman was arrested after the staff at the Sol Banyan Grande noticed bloodstains while cleaning the service apartment room and called in the police. The police contacted the driver of her cab and instructed him to head to the nearest police station.
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