After allegedly denying him a chance to meet his son for at least three weeks despite a court order, the CEO accused of murdering the four-year-old had asked him to pick up the child in a Bengaluru locality on January 7, a day after she had already checked into a serviced apartment in Goa.
The lawyer of Suchana Seth's husband, Venkat Raman, said the CEO sent an e-mail to Mr Raman on January 6 and said he could meet their child the next day. According to the police complaint lodged by the manager of a Goa serviced apartment, however, she had checked in with their four-year-old son on the very night this e-mail was sent. The room had been booked, and paid for, until January 10.
Mr Raman's lawyer said the husband was not aware that his wife and child were in Goa and he went to the designated meeting spot, waited for an hour, sent her a WhatsApp message and two e-mails asking if everything was okay, and then left when she did not turn up. The four-year-old's body was discovered in Seth's suitcase on January 8, when she had left Goa and was headed to Bengaluru.
Mr Raman recorded his statement before the Goa police on Saturday afternoon and said he had not been allowed to meet the child for the past five weeks, according to a report by news agency PTI.
'Seeking Retribution Futile'
Speaking to reporters in Hindi on Saturday, Mr Raman's lawyer, Azhar Meer, said seeking retribution after the child's death was futile, stating, "We do not expect any justice. The child is dead and why the mother did it is immaterial, in a sense."
Asked what the trigger for the murder could be, he said, "We can only guess. A mother doing this to her child is so unnatural that no answer can give anyone any closure. As for the trigger, we can guess that she probably did not want the son to meet the father and had, thus, filed cases. (In a custody dispute) every party thinks they have a right, but the child has an equal right to receive love from both the mother and the father."
Mr Meer said that the Bengaluru family court, where the custody case was being heard, had ruled progressively in Mr Raman's favour over the past year. He said Mr Raman was initially allowed to speak to the child on the phone or over video call, and then permitted to spend time with him within the court premises once in two weeks.
In November, the lawyer said, the husband was allowed to meet the child at home from morning to evening. "She was probably angry that the judge had been ruling in the father's favour, but why kill the child because of this anger?"
On Seth's claims that Mr Raman was harassing her, Mr Meer said that was a lie. "But even if we assume that it was true, what was the child's fault? The child wasn't harassing her. She could have taken out her anger at the husband, why take it out on the child... There is someone in custody in whose bag the child was found and then there's the husband who had to conduct his last rites. You can't imagine what he is going through."
'Refused To Comply'
The lawyer said the last court order, on November 20, permitted Mr Raman to meet his son once every week, from morning to evening. The meetings would take place on Sunday and the last one was on December 10.
"She didn't send the boy for three or four weeks. There were multiple requests, but she refused to comply. January 7, Sunday, is when the child was taken from this world and we had hoped that Mr Raman would be allowed to meet him that day," he said.
Asked whether Mr Raman knew that Seth and the child were in Goa, Mr Meer asserted, "No, he absolutely did not. On January 6, she had written an e-mail asking Mr Raman to pick up the child on the morning of January 7 from Sadashiva Nagar in Bengaluru. He went there and waited from 10 am to 11 am, went back home and then left for some work in the evening.
"Before leaving the meeting spot, he sent her a WhatsApp message saying 'I am here' and also sent two e-mails saying he was waiting and that he hoped everything was okay," he added.
The lawyer said Suchana had requested that the pick-up and drop-off point for Mr Raman's meetings with his son be a public place. "In her words, it was a child-safe place or something like that, and she used to use a coffee shop," he said.
According to the police, Suchana Seth had tried to die by suicide after allegedly murdering her son. She was caught in Karnataka's Chitradurga on January 8 - when she was on her way to Bengaluru, with the child's body in a suitcase - after the staff at the service apartment alerted the police about bloodstains being found in her room.
