Police recovered the cab from mathuraPolice on Sunday detained a man in Mathura in connection with the Uber rape case. The police are verifying whether the person detained is the main accused in the case.

The Uber cab driver had allegedly raped a 27-year-old woman while she was returning home from a dinner party in Gurgaon.

She had hired a cab through Uber to return home from on Friday night.

A rape case has been registered against the accused Shiv Kumar Yadav, 32, at Sarai Rohilla police station under Sections 376 (rape), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of IPC. VIDEO: Cab used in Delhi rape found in Mathura | Our thoughts are with the victim, says Uber

The incident took place at around 9:30 pm when the woman, who works for a finance company in Gurgaon, was headed back to her home in north Delhi’s Inderlok area. From the mag: Young and Dangerous | India’s Most Hated

“The woman had gone to a restaurant for dinner with some friends after her shift ended at 7 pm. One of her friends dropped her till Vasant Vihar from where she hired a cab run by a private company to take her to Inderlok,” police said citing the complaint filed by the victim.

On the way, the woman dozed off on the back seat of the car only to wake up and find that they had stopped at a secluded spot. She found that the car doors were locked and, when she tried to raise an alarm, the driver thrashed her and then raped her, police said. Five chilling similarities between Delhi and Mumbai gangrape cases | Timeline of Delhi gangrape case

In her complaint, the woman said the driver repeatedly slapped her and punched her when she tried to use her phone to make a call. He then reportedly warned her not to report the matter to the police.

Picture for representation only.The accused then dropped her off near her home in Inderlok after threatening to kill her if she spoke of the matter to anybody.

“The driver reportedly told the woman that he would drop her home safely only if she assured him that she would not report the matter. He warned her that he knew her address and would get her killed if she dared to complain about him to Uber,” said police sources.

“The woman clicked a photograph of the car’s number plate and then made a PCR call to report the incident,” police said. The incident was reported at around 1:25 am on Saturday and the vehicle, a Swift Dzire, was recovered from Mathura, in Uttar Pradesh, on Saturday.

She was sent for a medical examination, which confirmed rape but showed that she was not given any sedatives.

The victim told the police that she chose to keep quiet at that moment as she feared that the driver may kill her.

According to Madhur Verma, DCP (North), the driver and the vehicle involved in the incident were part of Uber’s newly-launched low-cost cab-booking service.

The driver did not have a driving licence issued by the Delhi Transport Authority and instead of a mandatory GPS system, the only link with the driver was an application that he had downloaded on the phone he was using.

Uber which is an international cab-booking service has its headquarters in New York and as per reports the police have not yet been able to access the log details of the car involved in the incident.

“We have been informed that the log details are stored at the company’s headquarters in New York,” the sources said.

It has also been reported that the driver did not undergo the mandatory police verification, and a background check was not conducted by the company.

Uber’s statement on the incident:

Our thoughts are with the victim of this terrible crime. We are working with the police as they investigate. We will assist them in anyway we can. It is also our policy to immediately suspend a driver’s account following allegations of a serious incident, which we have done.

Safety is Uber’s highest priority and in India, we work with licensed driver-partners to provide a safe transportation option, with layers of safeguards such as driver and vehicle information, and ETA-sharing to ensure there is accountability and traceability of all trips that occur on Uber platform.

-Evelyn Tay, Uber Spokeswoman