Sri Lankan Arrested: A Sri Lankan man was arrested Monday night at Suvarnabhumi Airport for using a Malaysian passport while trying to travel to France.
The man was arrested by at 9.30am by immigration police at the departure counter.
He was about to board Kuwait Airlines flight KU414 to Kuwait, with a planned connecting flight to Paris.
Pol Colonel Ploen Klinphayom, commander of the Suvarnabhumi Immigration Office, named the Sri Lankan as Pirapu Tharmaligam, 45.
Ploen said Tharmaligam was using a passport in the name of a Malaysian man, whose face he resembled in the passport photograph.
However, when the immigration officer used the facial-identification technique, he found several discrepancies and concluded that Tharmaligam was an impostor.
The Sri Lankan told immigration police that he had travelled to Malaysia via Singapore and bought the passport from a Malaysian agent, whom he identified as Mala.
He had paid 500,000 Sri Lankan rupees (Bt96,000) to the agent, he claimed.
Tharmaligam also said he had sneaked across the border into Thailand and travelled to Suvarnabhumi Airport to buy a ticket to France, from where he would travel to Switzerland. He said he had planned to seek asylum and stay with relatives in Switzerland, Ploen said.
