Didi driver suspected of murdering young woman believed to have been found dead

A diving team found the dead body earlier tonight in a Zhengzhou river

The body of a Didi Chuxing driver who allegedly murdered a young woman earlier this week is believed to have been found in a Henan river.

Just before midnight on May 5th, a 21-year-old woman surnamed Li who worked as a flight attendant for Lucky Air 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.

One of Li’s friends has shared screenshots of text messages that Li sent her that fateful night. In the messages, Li describes the driver as acting like a pervert, telling her that she is beautiful and that he wants to kiss her. “Luckily, I’m not sitting in the front,” she writes. The friend urged Li to make an excuse and get out of the car, however, Li insisted that she was fine.

That was the last that anyone heard from Li. After not being able to contact their daughter, Li’s parents called the police on May 7th. The following day, her body was found, half-naked and with multiple stab wounds.

Zhengzhou police said that the driver had murdered Li with a weapon. After checking over surveillance tapes, they found the suspect had abandoned his car and jumped into a river after killing his passenger.

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

Didi Chuxing 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 said that it was working with police to track down the killer and 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 identified as a man named Liu Zhenhua (刘振华).

At around 8:30 pm on Friday, a Zhengzhou rescue diving team discovered a body believed to be that of the suspect in a local river. A DNA test still needs to be performed to positively identify the corpse.

It’s not clear what this means for Didi’s 1 million yuan reward — which has since been deleted after netizens labeled it as “tacky” response to the tragedy.

The company, China’s largest ride-hailing service, has faced harsh criticism over the last few days for the part that it played in Li’s murder, with net users accusing Didi of lax safety standards and gaping security loopholes that allow dangerous individuals to become their employees.

Didi has explained that Liu Zhenhua was not one of its registered drivers, but his father was, and Liu had managed to log in on his account. The company’s registration system, which uses facial recognition technology by requiring a driver to take a selfie with their phone before starting their shift, is supposed to prevent something like this from happening. Unfortunately, it did not.

According to Tech Crunch, Didi explained that its facial recognition feature was “defective” that day.

In addition, Didi admitted that the account had received a sexual harassment complaint prior to Li’s murder. It’s not clear if the complaint was made against Liu or his father, however, it was not properly followed up on. The account remained active and able to take-on riders.

“Due to the imperfection of the arbitration rules of the platform, the complaint was not handled properly in subsequent days,” Tech Crunch quotes from Didi’s statement.

To hail a ride from Liu, Li had used Didi’s “Hitch” service which allows car owners to pick up passengers who happen to be going in their same direction in exchange for a bit of compensation.

Didi has announced that its Hitch service will be suspend nationwide for one week (starting at midnight tonight) so that the company can review the service.

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. Along with these two murders, there have been a number of stories over the years of Didi drivers harassing and exposing themselves to female passengers.