Out came the knife - dad tells of terror as daughter stabbed by 'Taxify driver'

"He stopped the car and said f-you. Out came the knife. He stabbed her in the side and he stabbed her twice in the back."

This is how a father described the ordeal experienced by his daughter and a friend after they requested a ride with e-hailing service Taxify in the northern suburbs of Cape Town in the early hours of Wednesday.

The father, Lance, told CapeTalk radio hours after the incident that the two were attacked by the driver of a vehicle that picked them up - after explaining they needed to stop at a boyfriend's house nearby for money as they did not have cash on them.

Gareth Taylor, country manager of Taxify in South Africa, confirmed that a "high priority team" had been activated to investigate the allegations.

"It is Taxify policy to immediately suspend from the platform any driver who is under any form of police investigation, and to remove them completely should they be convicted of any crime," he said via a statement published by News24.

Explaining what had happened to his daughter and her friend, Lance, whose surname was not revealed, said: "The two of them got in … and they were about a kilometre from my daughter’s boyfriend’s house … she never had any cash to pay the guy.

"They were just around the corner and she offered to pay double. He stopped the car and said f-you and everything else. Out came the knife, he stabbed her in the side and he stabbed her twice in the back.

"She managed to get out the car and run like hell," he told CapeTalk.

Her friend, seated in the back, was stabbed in the back. The young women were helped by the occupants of an ADT company vehicle and ambulance after the incident. They said a wallet and phone were stolen. The women were taken to hospital.

Cape Town mayoral committee member for safety and security JP Smith told CapeTalk on Thursday that e-hailing services could not distance themselves from the actions of their drivers.

"You are offering a service, you’re vouching for the fact that that service is reliable, you’re telling people to use it, you’re marketing it. You are responsible for what your independent contractors do in the same way that I believe that minibus taxi owners are responsible for what some of their drivers get up to. You can’t abdicate that responsibility," he said.

He urged victims of such incidents to open criminal cases with the police and offered to take up the latest incident with provincial transport MEC Donald Grant.

"Taxify should be facing an application, and I will take up with MEC Grant the revocation of their operating permit."

Taxify, he added, was in the process of applying for permits and the alleged incident, if verified, could affect those applications.