100 detained after Tibetans, monks attack China police station

Mar 22, 2009, 7:36 GMT

   Beijing - Police detained nearly 100 people after monks and lay Tibetans attacked a police station in China's western province of Qinghai, state media and Tibetan exiles said on Sunday.

   Several hundred people, including about 100 monks from the Ragya monastery, attacked the Gyala township police station in Qinghai's remote Golok (Guoluo) prefecture from Saturday afternoon, the Chinese government's Xinhua news agency said.

   Police were questioning six people arrested after the attack and 89 others who surrendered, the agency quoted local official Ju Kezhong as saying.

   Ninety-three of those under detention were monks from Ragya, and police were still searching for other monks who fled after the attack, it said.

   Police told the agency that the attackers were 'deceived by rumours about Zhaxi Sangwu,' who escaped from the police station' after his arrest on Friday for 'advocating 'Tibet independence'.'

The Tibetan exile radio station Voice of Tibet reported that Zhaxi Sangwu, or Tashi Sangpo, 28, was a Ragya monk who committed suicide by jumping into a river following his escape from police custody.

   Both accounts said Zhaxi Sangwu escaped from the police station while he was using the toilet on Saturday afternoon.

   The pro-Tibetan independence website Phayul.com quoted local sources as telling the Voice of Tibet that protesters carried a Tibetan national flag and banners into the town after they heard news of the death.

   The protesters chanted slogans such as 'independence for Tibet' and 'long live the Dalai Lama,' the website said.

   It said police arrested Zhaxi Sangwu after they claimed to have found a Tibetan national flag and political leaflets in his room.

   Xinhua said the attackers 'assaulted policemen and government staff' on Saturday, causing minor injuries to some of them.

   Most of Tibetans left the police station by 5 pm Saturday but about 30 remained there until the early hours of Sunday, it quoted Golok prefecture officials as saying.

   The attack is the biggest in a series of mostly small protests and other incidents reported in Tibetan areas of China around last week's 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.

   Paramilitary police have sealed off almost all Tibetan areas of China to foreign journalists and tourists for more than one week while the government has tightened border security and cut off some text messaging and other mobile telephone services in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas.

   In Lhasa, where rioting broke out on March 14 last year, troops in full battle dress reportedly patrolled deserted streets in the city centre last weekend.

   A small bomb hit a local government compound in the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan province on Monday, state media reported.