By JOE McDONALD,
Associated Press Writer
BEIJING – The U.S. government expressed concern Friday over reports that China has detained as many as 10 Tibetans in recent months, and said it was disappointed that Chinese officials failed to tell American diplomats about the cases during human rights talks in December.
A Chinese official this week confirmed accounts by Tibet activists that at least one more Tibetan was imprisoned and others detained in connection with a case that provoked foreign criticism when another Tibetan was sentenced to death last month for a fatal series of bombings.
The cases are unusually sensitive because word of the death sentence came just before talks in Beijing attended by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Lorne Craner, the State Department’s top human rights official.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said Chinese officials did not mention the additional cases to Craner. It said he expressed “deep concern” about the severity of the sentence imposed on the condemned man, Lobsang Dhondup, and the possible lack of a fair trial for him and a Buddhist leader convicted with him.
“We are disturbed by reports that as many as 10 additional Tibetans were arrested,” said an embassy statement. “It is now clear that these arrests had taken place well before the dialogue, and we are disappointed that Chinese authorities failed to inform us of them when we raised our concerns about two of the cases.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request Friday for comment on the U.S. statement.
Tibet activists accused China this week of failing to inform Craner of the other cases, and said that raised questions about Chinese sincerity toward the talks.
Craner told reporters after the talks that Beijing agreed for the first time to invite U.N. investigators to look into torture, religious freedom and other issues. He said it was a sign that communist leaders might be serious about trying to improve their human rights record.
Lobsang Dhondup is an aide to Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche, who was convicted with him and received a suspended death sentence. They were tried in a court in Ganzi, a district of the western province of Sichuan that abuts Tibet and has a large ethnic Tibetan population.
They were convicted in a series of bombings in 2001 in Ganzi, where one person was killed, and last April in Chengdu, Sichuan’s provincial capital. Chinese authorities said Tibetan pro-independence literature was found at the site of the April bombing in a park in Chengdu.
Tibet activists say the two men were denied lawyers and mistreated in detention. The U.S. government-financed broadcaster Radio Free Asia reported this week that Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche proclaimed his innocence in a tape recording smuggled out of jail.
An official at the Religious Affairs Bureau in Ganzi said this week that another Tibetan convicted in the same case, Tserang Dondrup, was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of “separatist activities.” The official wouldn’t give his name and said he didn’t know the date of the sentencing.
Activists said as many as 10 Tibetans had been detained and later released. The Chinese official confirmed that others had been picked up, but said he didn’t know how many.
The activists said Tserang Dondrup was detained for gathering signatures on a petition meant to deter an earlier attempt to arrest Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche. They didn’t give any details of charges against the other Tibetans, but noted that several were monks and had ties to the Buddhist leader.
