NONTHABURI - Police have raided a hotel in Muang district that was providing gambling, drugs and sex services for its exclusively Chinese guests.

About 100 police raided the eight-storey hotel on Ngam Wong Wan Road on Saturday after local residents complained it provided illicit services to its solely Chinese clientele, Pol Lt Gen Nathasak Chaowanasai, chief of the Central Investigation Bureau, said on Sunday. He withheld the name of the hotel.

The CIB chief said Chinese people entered and left the hotel around the clock and hotel staff always rejected Thai visitors, claiming it was fully occupied.

Pol Lt Gen Nathasak said there were rooms for guests on the second to sixth floors. Guests needed to use key cards to operate lifts which climbed only to the sixth floor. There were party rooms and gambling dens on the seventh and eighth floors. Entry from the sixth floor was controlled through locked doors. Most hotel staff were Chinese and stayed at the hotel.

Crime Suppression Division commander Pol Maj Gen Pattanasak Bupphasuwan said the Chinese hotel management had staff meet arriving Chinese guests at the airport. They were conveyed to the hotel in private vans.

Available at the hotel were accommodation, gambling, parties and sex services. Police seized ketamine, “happy water” drug cocktail, casino chips, dice, 110,000 baht in cash and surveillance cameras found on the hotel premises, he said.

According to the CSD commander, about 40 Chinese, Myanmar and Shan people were staying in the hotel.

One arrested Chinese man, Liu, 33, told police he was hired to provide and sell drugs to guests. Three Myanmar workers were held on immigration charges.

The hotel has 78 rooms and had previously been raided in 2023, when immigration police arrested 49 Thai and Chinese gamblers found there. It was closed, renovated and then reopened.