Nick named ‘The Doctor’, the criminal mastermind who has helped Tamil Tiger cadres escaping Sri Lanka for years has been arrested by Thai Police. According to The Phuket News, this Iranian master forger now languishes in a Thai jail after a rare slip unspooled a criminal enterprise that helped thousands of people to sidle into Europe and beyond.

For years detectives had hunted The Doctor, a name revered among Bangkok’s criminal underworld for producing the most sophisticated forged travel documents on the market for just $2,000 - $3,000 (B69,725 – B104,587).

Police swiftly raided an unassuming address in Muang distirct in Chachoengsao where they found The Doctor – a soubriquet drawn from his past as a nurse in Iran. Also there, hidden in a secret compartment, were 173 passports from France, Israel, New Zealand, Iran and Syria and a cache of electronic chips, moulds for visa stamps, ribbons, inks and specialist printing equipment.

Thailand welcomes visa-free travel to many countries and is Southeast Asia’s best connected transport hub, sharing long, ungovernable borders with Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. That draws transnational criminals moving everything from people and rare wildlife to drugs, weapons and gems. Transient, vast and permissive, Bangkok has for long provided sanctuary for people wanting to disappear or re-invent.

Police say The Doctor’s downfall has winded some criminal networks. But only temporarily whilst gaping holes remain in the detection system. Thailand does not check passports against Interpol’s stolen or lost passport database which registers tens of millions of documents. If it was, “we would know immediately,” when a stolen document was presented at a Thai border, Maj Gen Apichart Suriboonya, head of Thai Interpol said.

The incident returned the spotlight to Thailand’s key role as a global hub for fake passports, a shadowy industry dominated by highly skilled Iranians and Pakistanis serving customers from South Asia, the Middle East and further afield.