Erbil police arrest taxi driver who extorted passengers of $20K using scare tactics

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Police in the Kurdistan Region capital on Sunday arrested a taxi driver who extorted $20,000 from his passengers, a young couple, after threatening to reveal details of their intimate relationship to family members.

The cab driver in Erbil, who carried several female students to schools in his taxi daily, received the money after he introduced two student passengers, below 18, to each other. The two eventually began an intimate relationship.

“Once he bridged the relationship, he began to threaten both parties to give him money otherwise he would reveal their secret relationship to their families,” Director General of Erbil Police Abdulkhaliq Talaat told Kurdistan 24.

Open relationships between young couples are still considered a taboo in many parts of the Kurdistan Region and Iraq as they go against conservative religious norms and beliefs. These types of relationships are often done in private as revealing them could lead to severe consequences, with many females falling victim to honor killings or murder at the hands of relatives.

According to Talaat, the suspect had threatened the male to give him money regularly, or he would let the girl’s family know about their relationship. On the other hand, he used the same tactic against the girl to pressure her boyfriend to continue paying.

Kurdistan 24 spoke with the male victim to discover the threats the taxi driver had used to extort money from him.

“He once told me that her brother had found out about our relationship and that he [her brother] had requested about IQD 5 million (approx. USD 4,200) to tolerate it,” the young man said, asking to remain anonymous in the report.

He also revealed that the taxi driver had introduced him to two other ladies, employing the same tactics to force him to pay about $10,000.

The victim also mentioned that the driver would sometimes force the girls to ask and take money from “me and later, the driver himself would take the money from the girls.”

“Using all these tactics, he received a total of about $20,000 from the girls and the boy,” Talaat added.

His arrest came after the victim’s father, a construction worker, discovered that the money he stored in his home had substantially decreased, fearing it had been stolen. His son then admitted he had taken the money, and revealed the details of the case to his father.

The father later issued a complaint against the taxi driver at the police directorate which then led to the arrest.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany

(Additional reporting by Nawras Abdullah)