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.
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