Shiv Kumar Yadav being taken to a Delhi court (REUTERS)
If anyone had bothered to do a simple check on Shiv Kumar Yadav, a long list of major criminal offences would have been discovered.
The 32-year-old Uber driver, arrested for rape on Friday, has, according to records, a disturbing pattern of assaulting women.
In 2011, he spent seven months in a jail in Delhi for allegedly raping a woman who worked at a pub in Gurgaon. The police says he was acquitted in that case, but is unclear on how.
Last year, a case of rape was registered against him in Mainpuri in Uttar Pradesh, which is Yadav's home state. He was given bail in that case.
On Sunday, he was arrested from his village in Uttar Pradesh on charges of raping a 27-year-old finance executive in South Delhi last week. He is now in jail.
Uber, the company that uses an app to allow customers to hail taxis, has been banned in Delhi after executives ceded that they did not verify the documents that Yadav submitted when he joined the firm six months ago.
Among the papers was a permit submitted by Yadav that allowed him to operate a taxi. That license was given after a police certificate declared he had no criminal cases against him -a document that was forged, the police says.
Yadav, in fact, also got bail in other cases including one that charged him with illegal possession of a gun.
Investigators say that he has confessed that on Friday, when he saw his passenger dozing, he drove to an isolated part of the capital, warned her that he would violate her with an iron rod, and then assaulted her before abandoning her on a road near her home in North Delhi. She managed to take a picture of his license plate on her cellphone.
Among the major lapses that the government says Uber is guilty of is the fact that the car used by Yadav was not fitted with a GPS. Uber's only way of tracking him was through the app on his phone. Once he switched that off, he disappeared from Uber's radar.