Russian national Evgenil Turan, 33, and his wife Kamilya Khairullina, 27, of Kazakhstan, were arrested on Tuesday (July 23), Pol Maj Gen Vorapong Thongpaiboon, chief of the Tourist Police Bureau (TPB) Division 1, told a media briefing yesterday (July 25).
The couple presented themselves to the Tourist Police office at Suvarnabhumi airport at around 10:30pm, Gen Vorapong said. (See Tourist Police report here.)
The couple told police that they were denied boarding a flight to Phuket because they forgot to bring their passports.
The couple said they wanted to file statements with police so they could use the police report as identification to board the plane, Gen Vorapong added.
Tourist Police officers escorted the pair to Suvarnabhumi Airport Police Station to file the reports, but they noticed that the pair acted suspiciously, Gen Vorapong said.
After the couple filed the reports, the officers took them back to the Tourist Police office at the airport and had immigration officers and airport police jointly question them, said Gen Vorapong.
The officers then discovered the couple had their passports in their bags. The passports showed Mr Turan and Ms Khairullina had overstayed their visas by more than seven months.
Further investigation by police discovered that the couple had filed similar reports with police in other places in Thailand, Gen Vorapong said.
“They then used the statements and their driving licences as identification when travelling in the country to avoid being caught for overstaying,” he said.
Their actions posted a security threat, said Gen Vorapong.
Mr Turan was charged with overstaying his permit to stay in the country, reporting false information to officials, and providing false information to officials in order to obtain a document that could be used to harm others.
Ms Khairullina was charged with only overstaying.
Both Mr Turan and Ms Khairullina were blacklisted for five years, Gen Vorapong confirmed, and handed over to police at Suvarnabhumi for legal processing.