Fifty foreign nationals were arrested for overstaying their visas and other offences in the latest of a series of coordinated police raids on 87 locations across the country early yesterday.
The raids involving teams of police and officers from other agencies targeted locations in Bangkok and other provinces popular among foreigners. Among them were four international schools, one language school, 33 secondary schools and 49 other sites.
A total of 50 foreigners and one Thai national were arrested, said Pol Maj Gen Surachate, deputy chief of the Tourist Police Bureau.
Seventeen of the suspects (four from India, three from Vietnam, three from Nigeria, two from France and one each from Russia, Guinea, Gambia, Ivory Coast, and Lesotho), were charged with overstaying their visas.
Illegal entry charges were laid against 31 foreigners (11 from Cambodia, six from India, six from Laos, four from Myanmar, three from Vietnam and one from Nigeria). Two Myanmar nationals and one Thai were charged with other offences, he said.
The raids were the 14th in a series of operations staged since the X-Ray Outlaw Foreigner campaign began last year under the slogan "Good guys in, bad guys out". The goal is to crack down on foreigners who entered the country to commit crimes, such as credit card fraud and telephone and online scams targeting Thai victims.
Earlier this month, 42 foreigners were caught staying unlawfully in Thailand following recent raids on 83 locations across the country. Meanwhile, another operation which was a collaboration of Thai and Malaysian police resulted in an arrest of 10 Thais and two Taiwanese at a house on the Malaysian island of Penang near the Thai border that was used as a base by a Taiwanese-led phone-call syndicate.
