Uber driver Shiv Kumar Yadav, accused of raping a woman passenger, outside a court in New Delhi (Reuters photo)
The young executive who woke up to find the taxi in which she had dozed off parked in a secluded spot did not know it at the time, but later would realise that she was barely 3 km from home when she was raped.
The Uber driver, now arrested, later dumped her on the road near her North Delhi neighbourhood. She managed to take a picture of his license plate. Uber, which links customers to taxi drivers through an app, was banned yesterday in the city.
There are three police stations near the Zakira bridge, where the driver parked. Sources say five police vans patrolled the area on Friday night. None checked the deserted stretch that is a few meters from a major metro station, Inderlok.
The case has triggered an angry debate about why so little has changed since a young student was fatally gang-raped on a bus in the Capital two years ago.
That barbaric assault - six men were involved and an iron rod was inserted into the woman - was referred to by the Uber driver, according to his confession to the police. (
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He warned the 27-year-old executive that if she tried to fight him, he had an iron rod handy.
In December 2012, the bus that served as the scene of a crime that outraged India, circled slowly over a main road, passed undetected through multiple police check points. The tinted windows or the signs declaring it a school bus alerted nobody though it was late at night.
The student and her male companion, who had been beaten, were pushed naked and bleeding onto the road.
In that case, it turned out that the bus should not have been on the road at all - it did not have a valid permit.
The Uber driver's permit to operate a taxi was obtained through forged documents, the police have said. The driver, Shiv Kumar Yadav, had been arrested twice before for rape cases - in 2011 and 2013.