Two Tibetans Sentenced In China Bombings
(AP | Shanghai | December 5, 2002)
One Tibetan was sentenced to death and a second identified by activists as a Buddhist leader received a suspended death sentence for three bombings blamed on Tibetan independence supporters, a police official said Thursday.
Two bombings last year killed one person and injured another in the Ganzi region of Sichuan province in China's west, the official said by telephone from Ganzi. A third bomb went off in April in a park in the provincial capital of Chengdu.
Sichuan borders Tibet and has a community of ethnic Tibetans.
Both men were sentenced Monday by the Ganzi Intermediate People's Court on charges of using explosives and "incitement to split China," said the official. He would give only his family name, Li.
Li gave only Chinese, rather than Tibetan, names for the two defendants and refused to identify them further. But one matched the Chinese name given by the London-based Tibet Information Network, or TIN, for Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche, an influential Tibetan community leader in Sichuan.
TIN said Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche, 52, studied in the 1980s with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. TIN said he was arrested in April on charges of involvement in the bombings in Chengdu and Ganzi.
Authorities said they found pro-independence literature at the Sichuan bombing sites. Militants opposed to Chinese control of Tibet have carried out at least eight similar bomb attacks in the Himalayan region since the mid-1990s. Communist troops marched into the region in 1950, and Beijing says it has been part of China for centuries.
Death sentences in China are usually carried out, while suspended death sentences often are commuted to long prison terms. The man sentenced to death received the harsher penalty because police believe he set the bomb in Chengdu, Li said. He gave the man's name in Chinese as Luorang Dengzhu.
The second man was charged with helping Luorang, Li said. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly urged Tibetans to avoid violence in opposing Chinese rule, but some Tibetans have pushed for militant action.
RESPONSES:
Message from Kalon Tripa Samdhong Rinpoche To the Tibetans and friends of the Tibetan people:
I am writing to you concerning the report of the passing of death sentence on two Tibetans, Trulku Tenzin Delek (Angag Tashi) and Mr Lobsang Dhondhup. The report indicates that the two Tibetans did not receive a fair trial.
Given the background of Trulku Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, the authorities seem to be using uncorroborated charges to clamp down on people who work for Tibetan religion, culture and society.
Please urge your government to intervene in the matter and to ask the Chinese authorities to halt the implementation of the sentence and to provide these Tibetans a fair trial, guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution.
Prof Samdhong Rinpoche
(December 5, 2002)
Friends of Tibet (INDIA),
PO Box 16674, Bombay 400050
www.friendsoftibet.org