BANGKOK, Dec 1: An estimated 350,000 passengers have been unable to fly out of Thailand since anti-government protesters shut down Bangkok’s two airports last week, a senior tourism official said on Monday.

The main Suvarnabhumi international airport has been shut since last Tuesday when protesters besieged it in their bid to topple the premier, and a day later they stormed the smaller Don Mueang domestic airport.

“Around 350,000 passengers remain stranded in Thailand since the closing of the airports,” Sasithara Pichaichannarong, permanent secretary at the tourism ministry said.

That figure includes Thais who were booked on flights out of the kingdom.

She said that the tourism ministry would on Tuesday ask the cabinet to give them one billion baht ($28 million) to fund repatriation efforts for stranded foreigners, and to bring back the Thais stuck abroad.

“We have currently received only a 10-million-baht budget for this operation, which is certainly not sufficient,” she said.

About 10,000 Thai nationals are estimated to be stuck abroad by the airport closures, an official from the foreign ministry said.

Tourists are scrambling to leave Thailand via the small, Vietnam-era U-Tapao airport southeast of Bangkok, where queues snake round the basic terminal and thousands of passengers jostle to get their luggage through one scanner.

Check-in facilities have also been opened at a hotel and a convention centre in Bangkok to try to work through the backlog of frustrated holidaymakers. Some tourists are also flying out of provincial airports including Phuket and Chiang Mai. France, Spain and Australia have sent special flights to evacuate desperate citizens stuck in Thailand.

The government has warned that the week-long siege of the airports will be crushing for the tourism industry, with one minister saying one million jobs could be lost next year and arrivals could drop by half.—AFP