Aprofessional driver in Ibiza experienced a terrible incident in the early hours of Wednesday morning in his second year as a seasonal taxi driver when a customer threatened to kill him. The driver decided to make the incident public in order to raise awareness of the dangers of his profession, as well as the vulnerability that his colleagues sometimes experience when trying to report certain incidents — something he had experienced first-hand.
According to the driver’s statement to Periódico de Ibiza y Formentera, it all began in the early hours of Wednesday morning when he picked up two tourists leaving a well-known Ibiza nightclub. Another driver had refused the fare after seeing the state of the two men, who were Belgian and had only arrived on the island the previous day.
They asked the taxi driver to take them to Sant Agustí, but did not specify their exact destination. While one of them sat in the front passenger seat, the other remained in the back of the vehicle and fell into a deep sleep as soon as the journey began.
«Everything went more or less smoothly until we approached Sant Antoni, and I asked them for the location of their destination because they hadn’t specified it. Seeing that his friend had fallen asleep in the back, the one in the front began to get paranoid and ask why his companion had fallen asleep. He also told me that they were a group of 50 Belgians,« said the taxi driver, who explained how the tourist assured him that they never take drugs and that someone had possibly given them some substance without their knowledge.
When they came across an accident that had occurred at the Can Tomàs turn-off, the taxi passenger suddenly unfastened his seatbelt. During the journey, the taxi driver had to ask him several times to fasten it.
But, without a doubt, the most striking thing was when the Belgian began to claim that it was the taxi driver who had drugged them, thus initiating a most surreal situation, although ‘I didn’t feel any tension because this is an everyday occurrence,’ acknowledged the driver.
‘The guy accused me of drugging them. He became paranoid and started saying he wanted to go to the police, so I headed for the Civil Guard barracks in Ses Païsses. I don’t know what these people had taken, but it was as if their memory was being erased every five minutes,’ he recalled. In those circumstances, the taxi driver thought that going to the barracks was the best thing to do. Just before arriving, the man snapped at him: ‘If you stop the taxi, I’ll kill you.’
‘I didn’t remember that, but when I posted the video in our emergency group, my colleagues alerted me to the threat,’ said the driver, who explained that taxis usually have a camera system for security reasons.
As they were about to arrive at the police station, the Belgian unbuckled his seatbelt again and tried to lunge at the taxi driver, with whom he struggled while the latter remained at the wheel. ‘He threatened me and tried to kill me right there, trying to choke me by putting me in a headlock and pulling my hair. When we arrived, I was able to get out of the car and an officer came over,’ he recalled.
Meanwhile, the other Belgian was still asleep in the back seat.
However, what angers the taxi driver most is not what happened with this problematic customer, but that ‘the Civil Guard did nothing’. As there was no injury report, they advised him not to file a complaint ‘because it was a waste of time’.
At the police station, the taxi driver demanded that the Belgians pay him for the fare, just over £30. ‘That was another ordeal because they wouldn’t give me the money and the officers told me to settle for 20 euros.’
‘It’s outrageous,’ concluded the taxi driver, who continued his day after a truly nightmarish journey and lamented that the Belgians left as if nothing had happened.