Two Suvarnabhumi crimes solved by Surachate
PHOTOS: Thai Rath
Lt-Gen Surachate Hakparn, the high-profile immigration chief, has announced the solving of two cases at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok.
One involved a Thai woman using a passport illegally by adding extra pages. The other was the arrest of members of a Mongolian pickpocketing gang who had been preying on tourists at the airport and on the city’s Skytrain.
Firstly, the French embassy contacted Thai immigration with news that a 39 year old Thai woman, Chananya Daengthong, had applied for a visa with a passport that had added pages.
Officials found that four pages had been removed and replaced with new, fake pages. Chananya later admitted that she had been banned from entering The Netherlands after overstaying her visa there and had received no entry stamps on two pages in her passport.
She had then arranged, via a woman called “Nott”, to contact a man on a Line application called “Fa Sai”. She paid him 11,000 baht to alter her passport.
The other case resulted in the arrest of three men, all members of a Mongolian pickpocketing gang, responsible for stealing more than 200,000 baht from people at the airport and on the BTS Skytrain services from the city. Working in tandem with a woman, they targeted tourists.
Warrants went out for their arrest and they were soon nabbed whilst coming back into Thailand after going back to Mongolia.
In a latest theft on March 8 they followed a 59 year old German who had arrived on Thai Airways flight from Frankfurt. The victim only realised he had been pickpocketed, losing cash and a credit card, when he was in the taxi. CCTV showed that the woman in the gang was responsible for the theft.
The gang were then seen to be continuing their thefts on the Airport Link and BTS. In another case they lifted AUD$500 from an Australian on the Airport Link.
Surachate says the Mongolians would steal around Bangkok and the main airport then return to their home country. Credit cards were used to purchase brand name items at stores.
SOURCE: Thai Rath
