Calls to cancel Uber’s license in Egypt after a new rape attempt

Sally wrote in Published On the social networking site Instagram, this came after a previous request from the driver to cancel the trip artificially from the application, and transfer the cost of the trip to his personal phone, instead of the application that takes its share of each trip, but the girl and her sister refused.

Sally added that about half an hour later, after receiving several calls from callers claiming to be from Uber, offering to give her a ride as the person requesting the request, she received a call from a man on her sister’s phone, only to learn that she had been found covered with a wool blanket in a desert area east of Cairo. It was in bad condition and covered in blood.

After her sister was taken care of in the hospital, she told her that the driver threatened her with a knife, assaulted her, and tried to rape her, but she resisted, until the driver was surprised by a large truck on the way to him, and the victim took the opportunity to escape from the car, whose owner drove away.

In a statement, Uber expressed “deep sadness” over the incident and strongly condemned what it described as dangerous behavior. It confirmed that it had taken all necessary measures against the driver, including suspending his account on the application.

The company added that it had contacted a member of the girl’s family “to provide all possible support,” and that it was “working closely with local authorities to provide all the information necessary to complete the investigation process.”

Activists on social media began a massive campaign to boycott the Uber app in Egypt, due to what users described as “repeated incidents of harassment and kidnapping of girls.”

The “You Are Most Important” page on Facebook, a pioneering initiative launched by the Egypt Foundation for Health and Sustainable Development, launched a campaign to prevent dealing with Uber, through the hashtag stopusinguber.

The hashtag received widespread interaction on social media. Where she said Dina On the X website, the “Uber” application in Egypt is suffering from chaos, accusing the company of employing “criminal” drivers who endanger the lives of Egyptian women, noting that the application’s interest is focused on making profits, not on the lives of its users.

As for Youmna Ali, she demanded, on Facebook, the necessity of removing the “Uber” application from phones.

Lawyer Amr Abdel Salam filed a lawsuit, demanding the cancellation of the licenses of Uber and Careem in Egypt, due to their violation of the terms of the law regulating land transportation services using technology.

According to the Egyptian lawyer, this law stipulates that car drivers should be subjected to drug and alcohol tests before they are authorized to use the application, and that the Ministry of Interior be notified of the car driver’s data for criminal examination to determine his criminal record.

Abdel Salam demanded in the lawsuit, according to Published On Facebook, it obliges smart transportation companies to adopt electronic monitoring systems inside cars and link them to the internal system of companies and the Ministry of Interior, to monitor drivers’ behavior from the start of the trip until its end.

This comes days after Amal Salama, a member of the Human Rights Committee in the House of Representatives, demanded; The government temporarily suspended the operating license of Uber and its counterparts in Egypt, after a driver belonging to the company attempted to assault a German tourist, for which he was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

It is noteworthy that a week ago, the Cairo Criminal Court issued a 15-year prison sentence against a driver working for Uber, in addition to a fine of fifty thousand Egyptian pounds, equivalent to about a thousand dollars, and the cancellation of his driver’s license, after convicting him of attempting to kidnap the girl. Habiba Al-Shamaa, in a case known in the media as the “Sunrise Girl,” who died following the accident.

In the merits of its ruling, the court said that the driver was using drugs, and that he sped off in the car, and did not heed the girl’s repeated requests to stop, which prompted her to open the car door and throw herself out of it.