A Pakistani believed to be a member of the passport forgery gang headed by "The Doctor" has been arrested with almost 1,000 fake passports and other items including a fake Suvarnabhumi airport immigration stamp.
Abdullah Ghani Bhori, 59, was arrested during a raid on a house in Muang district of Nonthaburi by Immigration Bureau police and soldiers. A second raid at his condominium unit in the Silom area of Bangkok turned up equipment used to produce fake documents.
The two raids were carried out on Thursday and Mr Bhori was taken for a media briefing along with evidence including fake passports at the bureau on Friday.
Pol Gen Sriwara Rangsipramanakul, the deputy national police chief, told reporters that Mr Bhori was a member of the forgery gang led by the Iranian known as "The Doctor", who was arrested in February this year.
The raids on Thursday turned up almost 1,000 counterfeit passports for countries including Italy, France, Australia, Singapore, Israel and Spain. They also seized fake European drivers' licences, other IDs, fake immigration stamps for Suvarnabhumi Airport, paper and equipment used to print fake passports, and fake visa stamps.
Pol Lt Gen Nathathorn Prousoomtorn, the Immigration Bureau commissioner, said Mr Bhori was believed to be an an expert at producing high-quality fake passports that were difficult for authorities to detect.
The Pakistani national had long been a target of the authorities but he had moved around inside and outside the country using fake names. Even now, authorities are not completely sure that Abdullah Ghani Bhori is his real name.
His fake passports were said to have been sold for at least 7,000 baht each and his main customers were Pakistanis and human traffickers who sold the documents to refugees to enter European Union countries.
Mr Bhori was charged with producing fake official documents and passports. Police are now going after other gang members, some of whom may have fled to neighbouring countries.
The crackdown on the transnational passport forgery syndicate began in February with the arrest of Hamid Reza Jafary, a 48-year-old Iranian known as "The Doctor", in Chachoengsao. Police later caught five other alleged gang members, all of them Pakistanis.
Mr Jafary was wanted in many countries and had been the target of a months-long investigation in Thailand but proved very difficult to track as he held five passports and used various disguises. He lived quietly in Chachoengsao where he operated a computer-repair shop, upstairs from which he had a much more sophistcated operation for making fake documents.
In the end, police happened upon his phone number while examining a telephone seized from someone to whom he had sold a passport. When they saw that the same number had been used to order pizza, they were able to trace the delivery to the Chachoengsao address.