Delhi Police had to take a cab provided by Uber to find the company's office in Gurgaon.
Hours after a young woman in Delhi complained that she had been raped by the driver of an Uber taxi driver, the Delhi Police decided to visit the company office. Except, an address for the company, which supplies taxis to users of an app, could not be found.
Top police officers said the app did not offer a local address for the firm. So a police officer then downloaded the app, hailed a taxi, and asked the driver to head to the Uber office.
What they discovered is that the local branch of Uber, headquartered in San Francisco, is operating from three rooms in a hotel in Gurgaon. The company raised investment recently that values it at 40 billion dollars.
Uber, which has issued multiple statements condemning the crime and pledging its cooperation to the investigation, appears to be guilty of a variety of lapses, the police said. The driver, Shiv Kumar Yadav, who was arrested in Uttar Pradesh on Sunday evening, had been jailed three years ago for seven months in a case of sexual assault.
Uber has not commented on whether it was aware of this criminal record. Police sources say this is further evidence that the company did not verify the driver's background. The taxi he owned and used was not fitted with a GPS, making it impossible to track once Yadav switched off his phone, which was loaded with an Uber app used to track the driver's location.
The police will today deliver to Uber a legal notice asking it to join the investigation. Sources said the company is likely to face a case of negligence, and depending on the findings of the initial enquiry, the charges could be toughened to criminal culpability.
The woman who has alleged rape hired the taxi on Friday night. She dozed off in the car and woke up to find it parked in a secluded place where the driver assaulted and raped her, before abandoning her on the road near her home in North Delhi.