An İstanbul taxi driver was beaten up by his colleagues and expelled from a taxi drivers’ cooperative after the emergence of video footage in which he is seen calling a Senegalese passenger a ‘terrorist,” Turkish media reports said on Friday.
The footage, which went public on Friday, shows the taxi driver swearing at the Senegalese passenger he picked up at İstanbul Atatürk Airport and even hitting him.
The taxi driver asks the man, Ousmane Alyly, in the back seat of the taxi and secretly filming the conversation on his phone, whether he is a terrorist and came to Turkey to blow up the Blue Mosque.
Alyly asks the driver why he says such things.
While the Senegalese man is leaving the taxi, the driver also forces him to give him a TL10 tip.
The Atatürk Airport Taxi Drivers’ Cooperation announced on Friday that the taxi driver had been expelled from the organization and said the language he used with the Senegalese passenger was unacceptable.
Photos of the driver were later seen in the Turkish media after he was beaten up by his colleagues.
Alyly, who went to the İstanbul police to file a complaint against the taxi driver, said the driver got angry after he asked him to turn on the taximeter. Alyly said the driver wanted to charge him $20 without turning on the taximeter for a distance that would have cost less. The Senegalese man said he told the driver to turn on the taximeter and he would pay the amount it shows, which sparked an angry reaction from the driver.