Two Tibetan women were arrested for staging separate protests in Sichuan Province that were critical of China, an advocacy group for Tibet said yesterday.
A nun in her 20s and a 36-year-old woman were detained on Thursday in Ganzi, a Tibetan area of Sichuan, after handing out pamphlets that called for the exiled Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet, respect for Tibetans’ human rights, religious freedom and the release of Tibetan political prisoners, the International Campaign for Tibet said.
Their whereabouts are unknown, it added.
The organization said the arrests occurred “in an atmosphere of increasing tension in the area” ahead of the 50th anniversaries of the March 10, 1959, start to a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule and the March 17, 1959, flight of the Dalai Lama into exile in India.
Rallies held last year on the March 10 anniversary escalated in Lhasa days later into anti-Chinese violence, the worst in almost two decades. The protests spread to other Tibetan-settled areas, including Ganzi.
Nearly 1,000 Tibetans were arrested in Lhasa over last year’s unrest and 76 received prison terms ranging from less than five years to life, said Qiangba Puncog, the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The remainder were released, he said, according to the official China Daily newspaper.
Most of those convicted were found guilty of theft, robbery, arson, disrupting public services or attacking government agencies, while a few were found guilty of “endangering national security,” Puncog said on Friday in Beijing.
No information was given for arrests made last year in other parts of Tibet or the neighboring provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu.
He said he did not expect unrest on this year’s anniversary.
He said no unusual security measures were being taken, but Tibet activists said China has placed Tibet under “de facto martial law” ahead of the anniversaries.
Witnesses in Tibet reported a strong army presence, military convoys, deployment of paramilitary police and roadblocks, the London-based Free Tibet Campaign said on Friday.
“I cannot swear that some individuals won’t make reckless moves next week, but riots like those seen last March won’t happen again,” Puncog said.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS