Uber rape: Police recover accused cabbie's iPhone

Delhi police has recovered the iPhone which was provided by Uber to the driver accused of raping the 27-year-old finance company executive on Friday night inside the cab which she had booked through the company’s app.

The smartphone was recovered from Mathura by a Delhi police team which had gone there with the accused Shiv Kumar Yadav on Tuesday in search of the phone. 

Police have already recovered two of the three phones used by Yadav.

Uber provides its cab drivers an iPhone with the Uber app. Customers book a cab through the company’s app. The system then sends a message to the driver of a cab nearest to the customer and when he accepts the ‘assignment’, his name, photo and other details of the cab like its registration number is sent to the customer through this app.

“The phone is important evidence for us. It will prove that Yadav works for Uber which will help us prove the culpability of the cab service. It will also prove that Yadav was driving the cab which the victim has booked,” said a senior police official.

Its GPS signature will help us corroborate the route from where she was picked, the course the cab took to reach the spot where the crime took place and when he dropped the victim near her home, he added.

The accused driver had dropped a message in the company’s system that the customer has been dropped and then exited the app. He had then fled to Mathura.

Yadav, who was driving an Uber cab, had allegedly raped a 27-year-old financial executive, who works for a multinational company in Gurgaon, on Friday night when she was headed back home in north Delhi’s Inderlok area. He was later arrested from Mathura and is under three-day police custody.