Saif Ali Khan walked into an auto rickshaw with a knife-blade stuck to his spine in the early hours of Thursday but the driver did not know that the man in the blood-soaked kurta was the Bollywood star.

Bhajan Singh Rana on Friday told the media that he was initially not aware that the passenger he had ferried to Lilavati Hospital in the western Mumbai suburb of Bandra was Saif.

“It was only when we reached the hospital gate that he called the guard and said, ‘Mein Saif Ali Khan hun, doctor ko bulao [I am Saif Ali Khan, call the doctors],’ that I got to know,” the auto driver told reporters in Mumbai on Friday.

He said when he was driving by the Satguru Darshan building when a woman and a few others asked him to stop. Saif lives in the top floors of the 12-storey building.

“Then the person whose white kurta was soaked in blood got in the auto. I noticed he had neck and back injuries, but did not notice the hand injury,” Rana said.

He said Saif walked into the auto although he was visibly badly injured.

“There was a seven-eight-year-old boy who also boarded the rickshaw,” he said, when asked if the actor’s son Taimur accompanied him to the hospital.

Initially, they thought of going to the Holy Family hospital in Bandra but then Saif asked to be taken to Lilavati, which is also in Bandra, the driver said.

The auto reached the hospital around 3am.

And in true Mumbai style, Rana said he did not take any money from the star after dropping him at the hospital within seven to eight minutes.

Saif was speaking with the boy in the auto, Rana said, adding there was also another young man in the auto – an apparent reference to Ibrahim Ali Khan, the 23-year-old son of Saif and his first wife, Amrita Singh.

Asked if the police had spoken to him, the auto driver replied in the negative.