Published on November 5, 2023, at 17:13.
On Monday, Pol Gen Surachate Hakparn, the deputy national police chief, will travel to Yangon to meet with Myanmar officials about returning 162 Thais who were ejected from the town of Laukkaing in the northern Shan State, which borders China, to a secure location.
The 162 had been duped into doing illegal work in Laukkaing, the money of the Kokang self-aggrandized territory, by an online scam group.
Authorities in Myanmar apparently assisted 29 Vietnamese fraud victims in leaving a resort in Laukkaing where they had been hiding on Saturday. Later, they joined 133 other people at a secure protection inside an army tent in Myanmar, bringing the total to 162.
While in Yangon, Pol Gen Surachate declared that he would join with Myanmar officials to explore strategies for returning the 162 Thais to Thailand. Therefore, in order to observe them, he would travel to the military camp where they were protected.
He claimed that while some Thais had been lured to operate at call centers as mobile fraud users, people may have been the victims of human trafficking.
According to Pol Gen Surachate, the 162 Thais may need to be transported across the frontier to Kunming in China initially due to the intense fighting that is currently taking place in the region between the Myanmar troops and military ethnic minority groups. From there, he said, planes could be scheduled to take them back by heat.