2 Garden Grove Men Feared Held by Thais : Inquiry: Rep. Dornan asks State Department to investigate on behalf of Lao rights group.

Rep. Robert K. Dornan has asked the State Department to investigate the possible arrest of two Orange County men who were vacationing in Thailand.

“We received information from the families yesterday, and the congressman has made a request for information from the State Department, and that’s all we know,” Dornan’s press secretary Brian Keeter said Wednesday. “We don’t know the circumstances at all. That’s why we requested the information.”

Meanwhile, Ong Lor Vang and her 18-year-old son, Chong, wait anxiously in their Garden Grove home for word about her husband, Fong Vang, 49, and his traveling companion Moua Yee, also of Garden Grove.

Vang is a former Laotian colonel, but both men are U.S. citizens, according to Vang Pobzeb, chairman of the Lao Human Rights Council in the United States, a Denver-based organization. Pobzeb thinks the men were arrested without cause on Sunday in the Chieng Kham Hotel in Thailand near where Vang was visiting a relative in a refugee camp.

A spokesman at the Thai Consulate in Los Angeles said he has heard nothing about the reported arrests. Officials at the U.S. State Department could not be reached for comment.

Vang left Garden Grove in late September to vacation in Thailand and met up with Moua while overseas, said Vang’s wife.

“The U.S. government does not pay attention to the issues unless we release the information to the public,” complained Pobzeb Vang, of the Lao Human Rights Council, who sent letters to Dornan (R-Garden Grove) and other federal government officials asking for help.

“The Lao Human Rights Council and families, relatives and other parties concerned would like to appeal to the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok to appeal to the Royal Thai government to release Mr. Vang Fong and Moua Yee immediately,” his letter to Dornan reads. “The authorities . . . who are conspiring to arrest the two gentlemen shall be fully responsible.”

Pobzeb Vang said that the arrests were made by a man who was a special agent for the Communist Pathet Lao government for many years and who has been used by the Thai government to “create troubles and divisions for the Hmong refugees in Thailand since June, 1991.”

Times staff writer Eric Young contributed to this report.