He may never know what got into the mind of the lady passenger who accused him of raping her inside his cab, but Mohammed Asif would forever remain grateful how his phone app was able to save him from her wrongful accusation.

On February 20, Astria Berwick boarded his cab. The travel went smooth and he was able to deliver her to the address she had given. To say that the day went routinely and boring was actually an understatement. So that when police officers accosted Mr Asif based on Ms Berwick's complaint that he had raped her at knife-point in his cab, he was utterly surprised.

Expectedly, a tug-of-war accusations and denials ensued. Later on, the impossible happened.

Mohammed Asif and his phone that helped save the day.

The complainant became the convicted and the defendant guilt-free, all thanks to Mr Asif's phone app which literally saved the day.

As Ms Berwick tried every conceivable notion she can think of to nail Mr Asif to the alleged crime, she was no match to the latter's smartphone, the lone, silent witness to everything that supposedly happened inside his cab.

Nottingham Crown Court which heard the case learned the CCTV in Mr Asif's cab unit happened to be broken on the day the alleged rape attack occurred, so he had switched on his phone's app as a makeshift replacement. Call it foresight perhaps but it did prove to be useful later on.

"This was outrageous behaviour by the defendant against a wholly innocent man who had been saved by the recording on his phone," Judge Michael Stokes QC, The Recorder of Nottingham, was quoted by The Telegraph.

The complainant Ms Berwick eventually admitted to fabricating her story for some "unaccountable reason." For her wild imagination and "perverting the course of justice," she was slapped a 16-month imprisonment sentence.

Free But Still Scathed

Still, Mr Asif got traumatized over the incident.

Although he sure knows he was lucky enough because his phone app was a most helpful witness, "I'm completely different now. I'm scared to go out."

"She changed my life," the father of two said. "I keep thinking, 'I just dropped her off, she was just a normal passenger, why has she done that?"

During his ordeal, Mr Asif said he lost weight, had a hard time sleeping and was afraid to leave the house to go to work for a month, had sleeping problems that made him shed of some weight.