A police raid on a building in downtown Bangkok has exposed a Chinese woman with Thai citizenship by marriage and a long history of alleged involvement in fraud, human trafficking, surrogacy and document forgery.
Details were released on Tuesday by deputy police chief Pol Gen Surachate Hakparn.
He identified the woman only as Ms Navaporn, 53, and said she was arrested on Saturday at a building on Silom Road in Bangkok's Bang Rak district.
On April 4, police had searched the five-storey building. They found seven foreigners holding non-citizen identification cards, or pink cards. They also discovered rooms and equipment arranged for Thai women who were surrogate mothers for Chinese people.
Further investigation revealed that the building belonged to Ms Navaporn. She allegedly brought foreigners into Thailand and registered them as being domiciled in the building, giving false information and fake documents to authorities showing that they were her relatives.
By doing this, she managed to get them pink cards.
Pol Gen Surachate said Ms Navaporn was a Chinese national who obtained Thai citizenship after marrying a Thai man. She later divorced him and married a Chinese man, and they had three children. The children had Thai citizenship, because of their mother.
Ms Navaporn had previously been charged with duping Chinese nationals to invest in businesses in Thailand, he said.
Moreover, according to information obtained by police from Chinese authorities, Ms Navaporn had been involved in human trafficking in China, Thailand and Cambodia for about 10 years.
She owned many companies in the names of her relatives and her children as well as blocks of land and luxury cars.
The Interior Ministry would also be asked to check whether Ms Navaporn's Thai citizenship had been obtained legally.
According to a Chinese news agency, Ms Navaporn's Chinese name is Zhou Qiong.
