KANCHANABURI: Forty-two job seekers from Myanmar were arrested after illegally crossing the border into Sangkhla Buri district late on Wednesday night, authorities said yesterday.
Soldiers, border patrol police and immigration officers were despatched to tambon Nong Lu following a tip-off that a group of suspicious-looking people had been found in a forested area in Song Kalia village, said Col Thatchadet Arbuarat, deputy commander of the army’s Lat Ya task force, who was alerted at about 10pm.
By the time the officers arrived, there was no one at the scene. The same informant told them that the people had boarded a vehicle headed towards a pier at Wat Wang Wiwekaram in Wang Ka village Moo 2 in tambon Nong Lu.
The team later found the men and women gathered near Vajiralongkorn Dam behind the pier. On seeing the officers, they ran into a nearby forest. All 42 people — 27 men and 15 women — were subsequently caught. All were Myanmar nationals without travel documents.
During questioning, they said that they had travelled from Mandalay, Bago, Yangon and other parts of Myanmar. They entered Thailand via a natural crossing in Sangkhla Buri and were heading to promised jobs in Bangkok, Chon Buri, Phuket, Samut Prakan, Samut Sakhon and Rayong. Some were promised jobs in Malaysia.
The migrants told officers they had agreed to pay between 20,000 and 30,000 baht each to job brokers. The money was to be paid when they arrived at their destinations.
They were taken for body temperature checks as part of Covid-19 screening. All were normal. They were handed over to police at the Sangkhla Buri station for legal proceedings. Large numbers of migrants continue to cross into Thailand illegally every day from Myanmar, where economic conditions have deteriorated considerably since the military seized power two years ago.
About 80,000 illegal border crossers, the vast majority of them from Myanmar, were estimated to have been caught in 2021. But as many as 100,000 more probably slipped past authorities and were now employed in various parts of the country, say groups that work with migrants.