Global Courant 2023-05-02 02:18:40
He was taking a couple to the center of the capital, but they made him divert to a dark area and they assaulted him at dawn this Monday. The driver’s fear when telling what happened: they had to make 13 stitches on his face.
Sergio (49) was driving his taxi in Córdoba, in the early hours of Labor Day. When he was passing through the Maurizi neighborhood, a couple asked him to take them to the center of the capital, but they warned him that they had to make a stop in Bella Vista first. Already in that neighborhood, the ambush arrived: the man attacked him with a bottle, slashed his face and managed to steal his phone.
“Now I don’t know how to sit in the taxi and carry someone, what is going to happen,” the victim reflected. After filing the complaint, the police arrested the couple who participated in the assault.
The episode began at 2:30 in the morning this Monday. Sergio picked up a 33-year-old man and a 49-year-old woman, in Julio Argentino Roca at 1,100. The order was to take them to San Juan and Independencia, an intersection located in the center, about 2.22 kilometers away.
However, as they walked they changed and asked him to go through the Bella Vista neighborhood first so, according to the couple, they could leave money for their daughter.
Upon reaching that neighborhood, they made him divert until he reached a street that is “a little elbow”, as the driver described it. There the woman went down to finalize the delivery of money. But the wait extended and suspicions grew.
“We waited four or five minutes. ‘The lady is late,’ I told the man. Another five more minutes passed. I lowered the window, asked her to hurry up. I began to suspect,” Sergio told the TN signal.
A taxi driver was attacked with a slash to the face in an attempted robbery in Córdoba. TN Capture
They were alone in a “dangerous and little traveled” area. The driver began to look in the mirrors if any other car was arriving. As he turned to the left, he took the first punch. “He hit me in the face with the bottle’s spout. He doesn’t give me the option to tell him anything. ‘Give me the money, give me the money,’ he asked me,” said the victim.
Sergio resisted the blows and was also attacked in the arms. Finally, the assailant got out of the taxi. He only managed to take a phone.
The driver filed the complaint for the episode and had to be treated at the Emergency Hospital, where they put 13 stitches on his face. They also had to sew it into the arms. The couple was arrested by the Police at 6 in the morning, when they were arguing in the street. Both have criminal records.
“I don’t know how to sit in the taxi and carry someone, what is going to happen,” lamented the driver, who was left in fear. “But I have to go out, I have a family and we have to move on.”
Wave of insecurity in Córdoba: the taxi driver who was saved by centimeters
This is not the only recent history of aggression against a taxi driver in the capital Córdoba. On Friday, April 21, another driver was intercepted by motorcycles when he was dropping off a passenger in the Kennedy neighborhood: they shot him from the window and wounded him in the head, but he miraculously escaped.
“I had already paid him, I was putting the change in my wallet when he told me ‘they are going to rob us’. That’s when they shot him,” the user described.
The driver, with 25 years of experience in the field, also gave his version. “I parked to leave the passenger and when I see that a motorcycle was coming towards me, I sped up. I got to the door of the Jockey and felt like I was dying,” he told El Doce.
A policeman who was at the door of the mall loaded him into his car and took him to the Emergency Hospital. He had to undergo surgery and was discharged three days later.
“I used to take a taxi and I left it due to insecurity. You cannot work, I don’t know what we have to do to get out calmly,” his brother said.
Drivers have been demonstrating for insecurity. The last mobilization was made on Saturday, April 22, in front of Patio Olmos.
DS
