The Foreign Affairs department was trying to verify on Friday the citizenship of two men, said to be South Africans, in trouble with the law in Indonesia and Thailand.
”We are awaiting verification of the identities of the two men from our respective South African missions,” a departmental official said.
French news agency AFP reported that a South African has been sentenced to death in Indonesia for smuggling heroin.
Okonkwo Kingleys was sentenced on Wednesday by the district court in the North Sumatra provincial capital Medan, said a court worker.
Judge Dahlia Brahmana was reported as saying that Kingleys was convicted of smuggling 69 heroin capsules hidden in his stomach. He was reportedly proven to be a middleman in an international narcotics network bringing heroin from Pakistan to Indonesia.
He was arrested when he got off a flight from Malaysia.
More than a dozen people are on death row in Indonesia for drug offences, but no executions have been carried out in recent years.
In Thailand, meanwhile, two Europeans and a South African were reportedly arrested for forging hundreds of Italian passports and visa seals they allegedly planned to sell in Europe.
Immigration police said that Briton Robert John Pope (57) and German Uwe Schneider (30) were arrested at their flat in Bangkok on Wednesday night with 119 fake Italian passports, 120 Italian passport stamps, and 10 British passports.
As police brought the two to immigration headquarters for interrogation, South African Philipp Hofer (31) allegedly arrived and offered police a 500 000 baht ($12 500) bribe to release them and the documents.
He was then charged with bribery as well as falsifying and using official documents. – Sapa