Didi driver on the run after murdering 21-year-old female passenger

The tragic murder has caused Chinese net users to once again call into question Didi Chuxing’s security standards

China’s leading ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing is once again facing widespread public outrage and scrutiny following the murder of a young woman by one of its drivers.

The 21-year-old woman, surnamed Li, was a flight attendant for Lucky Air. Late on the night of May 5th, she hired a driver through the Didi app to take her from the Zhengzhou airport back to her home downtown.

Unfortunately, she never made it back home. Zhengzhou police say that the driver killed Li with a weapon. He remains on the run.

News of Li’s murder broke on Thursday and quickly become one of the most-discussed topics on Chinese social media.

Didi Chuxing has apologized for the young woman’s tragic death, stating that its responsibilities in the case are “undeniable” and that it needs to “win back customers’ trust.” The company has said that it is working with police to track down the killer and has vowed to review its standards and procedures to try to ensure that something like this never happens again.

In addition, on Thursday evening, Didi announced a reward of up to 1 million yuan for information leading to the capture of the driver — which they have identified as a man named Liu Zhenhua (刘振华).

However, these apologies and pledges have not allowed the company to escape criticism for Li’s murder with net users accusing the company of lax safety standards and security loopholes that allow dangerous individuals to become their employees.

While Didi boasts of having the most rigorous background checks in the industry in China, many netizens say that they are obviously still not tough enough, calling on the company to do more to screen its potential drivers.

Didi was met with similar calls to raise its security standards back in May 2016 after a driver murdered a 24-year-old woman in Shenzhen. The company responded at the time by increasing safety precautions, including the adding of a passenger SOS button onto its app.

However, evidently, more work still needs to be done for the company which counts 450 million registered users at the moment and hopes to get that number to 2 billion within the next decade.