US detains Thai student
The Foreign Ministry is trying to obtain the release of a Thai PhD student detained by the US Department of Homeland Security for "suspicious behaviour" in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, ministry spokesman Tharit Charungvat said yesterday.
The student, whose name has not been released, had attended a lecture on the possession of weapons for a class he was not enrolled in.US authorities suspect the Thai student may have attended the lecture on legal issues relating to weapons possession in order to learn how to obtain weapons, Tharit said. Concern over campus safety has reached fever pitch in the US after Cho Seung-hui, a Korean-born student at Virginia Tech University, gunned down 32 students and staff before killing himself in mid-April, Tharit said. The detained Thai student is a PhD candidate at an Illinois university on a Thai government scholarship, Tharit said. The ministry has assigned the Thai Embassy in Washington DC and the Thai Consulate General in Chicago to secure his release, he said.
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