By Fazeena Saleem
DOHA: A lower criminal court here has sentenced a taxi driver to a month in jail after finding him guilty of overcharging passengers. The court also ordered the deportation of the driver after serving the sentence.
Two men took a taxi from Souq Waqif to their hotel. The meter showed QR25 when they reached the hotel. The duo handed a QR50 note to the cabbie but he demanded QR10 more, to which the passengers objected and insisted he return QR25. However, the taxi driver sped away. The alert duo noted the taxi’s number and reported the matter to the police. The driver was picked up and questioned by the police and charges were filed against him in the court which handed him a month’s sentence.
In an unrelated incident last Monday, two Indian passengers called in the police after a taxi driver allegedly refused to switch on the meter and threatened to assault them when they tried to take photographs of the meter with their mobile phones.
The duo boarded the taxi from near the Marriott Hotel to go to the New Salata area. The taxi driver refused to start the meter even as the commuters insisted and instead asked them to pay QR50. When the two objected, the cabbie told them it was an airport taxi and so was slightly expensive.
“We knew he was lying. It wasn’t an airport taxi, so we asked him politely to flag down the meter,” one of the complainants told this newspaper.
The duo said one of them then tried to take snapshots of the meter with his mobile phone handset which infuriated the cabbie, an African national.
“The driver began using abusive language and gestured in a violent way to hit and turned the taxi back towards the Marriott Hotel, so we called in the police,” said one of the commuters.
The police arrived and, according to the duo, urged them to forgive the cabbie but recorded their complaint. They (the police) took signatures of the passengers and the cabbie on a form that was in Arabic, said the duo.
The policemen said this was a first complaint against the cabbie and action would be taken if he repeated the violation. The passengers did not complain to Mowasalat, owners of Karwa — to which the taxi belonged — as they said it would have been futile.
To recall, a senior Mowasalat official recently admitted in remarks to this newspaper that they got about 200 complaints from commuters everyday and some of them were serious.
The Peninsula
