Monday's Globe and Mail report says the Tamils arrive in Bangkok from Sri Lanka on two-week tourist visas and stay in rented apartments pretending to be tourists until the next ship is ready to sail to Canada.
The report citing the Thai police says some of the refugees left on MV Sun Sea, the cargo ship that reached Vancouver earlier this month with 492 Tamil asylum seekers on board, were recent arrivals, who entered the country on tourist visas shortly before the ship departed in April.
The Globe and Mail from a source has obtained a list of addresses where recently arrived Tamils were being lodged before their departure for Canada and interviewed some of those tourists who claimed not to know much English except saying that "Tourists. Arrived last week. Leaving next week."
A group of four Sri Lankan Tamil men, who were interviewed by the journalist, have said that they are in Thailand on vacation, but have rarely been outside their one-room apartment for sight-seeing or any other tourist activities.
According to Thai authorities, before the departure of MV Sun Sea, groups of refugees have traveled by caravan from Bangkok to a fishing hamlet near Songkhla in the south and lodged in a hotel before boarding a small boat that took them to a rendezvous with the Sun Sea in the Gulf of Thailand.
The Globe and Mail report says the entire operation, financed by enormous amounts of money, leave behind the legitimate asylum-seekers who don't have the money to pay for the agents who operate in the Thai capital and charge tens of thousands of dollars for safe passage to Canada.
Canada's Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has said that the organizers of the voyage of the MV Sun Sea charged up to $50,000 a passenger for a potential total haul of more than $20 million.
Sri Lankan authorities say the Tamil migrants are economic refugees who are taking advantage of Canada's relaxed immigration laws.
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