The officer who led the investigation told the Bangkok Post that Butt
had paid off senior officials in return for protection. His gang also
reportedly supplied forged passports to Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka
and the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group, thought to be behind the
2008 Mumbai attacks which killed at least 166 people. Butt was jailed
for 15 years in 2012.
Thailand’s passport scams are said to have
originated in the 1980s, when criminal gangs started stealing and
crudely falsifying passports to cash in stolen travellers’ cheques.
Today they are more sophisticated, with expert forgers inserting
photographs and fake pages into authentic passports, or making fake ones
from scratch using cutting-edge printing technology.
Occasionally,
hard-up tourists will sell or “rent” their passports to the gangs, but
more often they are stolen from bars, hotels and other places where
tourists congregate. Occasionally they go missing after being handed
over when tourists rent motorbikes or jet skis. It said officials have
assembled a blacklist with 1,500 names of known or suspected forgers –
mostly from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan.
***
Third world shitholes like thailand, and indeed malaysia and indonesia, are accidents waiting to happen. But hey, let's keep pretending that they're basically just like us.
PC is going to get a lot of innocent civilised people killed one of these fine days.
