Rioting erupted in a province neighbouring Tibet today, two days after violent protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule in Lhasa that the region's exiled representatives said had killed 80 people.
An injured man is led on a street in Lhasa, capital of Tibet
Protesters hurled petrol bombs, burning down a police station and a market in Aba, Sichuan and also torched two police cars and a fire truck.
Security forces fired tear gas and arrested five people. The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said on a website that paramilitary police shot and killed at least seven protesters.
A police officer, reached by telephone, denied this. One ethnic Tibetan resident in Aba said there were loud sounds like gunshots and there was widespread talk of 10 or more dead.
"Now it's very tense. There are police going around everywhere, checking and looking over people for injuries," said another resident of Aba, adding that many of the rioters were students of a Tibetan-language high school.
The new disturbances came as the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet and Nobel peace laureate who fled to India in 1959, called for an investigation into whether cultural genocide - intentional or not - was taking place in his homeland.
"The Tibet nation is facing serious danger. Whether China's government admits or not, there is a problem," the Dalai Lama, who is reviled by Beijing as a separatist, told reporters in Dharamsala, his base in northern India's Himalayan foothills.
Meanwhile, anti-riot troops locked down Lhasa - a remote city high in the Himalayas barred to foreign journalists without permission and now sealed off to tourists - to prevent a repeat of Friday's violence, the most serious in nearly two decades.
A businessman there, reached by telephone, said a tense calm had descended on the city and most people were staying indoors.
The spasm of Tibetan anger at the Chinese presence in the region came after days of peaceful protests by monks and dealt a sharp blow to Beijing's preparations for the Olympic Games in August, when China wants to showcase prosperity and unity.
The government-in-exile in Dharamsala said 80 people had died in the clashes between the authorities and protesters last week, and 72 had been injured. The official Xinhua news agency said only that 10 "innocent civilians" had died, mostly in fires lit by rioters, and that 12 policemen had been seriously injured.
Tibet is one of several potential flashpoints for the ruling Communist Party at a time of heightened attention on China. The government is concerned about the effect of inflation and wealth gaps on social stability after years of breakneck economic growth, and this month it said it had foiled two plots by Uighur militants in the large Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang, including an attempt to disrupt the Olympics.
The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said in an e-mail that monks of the Amdo Ngaba Kirti monastery, also in Sichuan's Aba prefecture, had raised the banned Tibetan flag and shouted pro-independence slogans after prayers today.
Chinese security forces stormed the monastery, fired tear gas and prevented the monks from taking to the streets, it said. The report could not be independently confirmed.
Xinhua said many shops had reopened in Lhasa and cars were back on the streets as calm returned to the city. But a businessman, reached by telephone, said: "It's dead silent. There are a few kids and people beginning to walk around, but mostly people are staying inside."
The authorities have set rioters in Lhasa an ultimatum, urging them to hand themselves in to police tomorrow midnight and gain possible clemency, or face harsh punishment.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a statement, urged Beijing to "release monks and others who have been detained solely for the peaceful expression of their views".
The Dalai Lama, who says he only wants greater autonomy for his people, said China deserved to host the Olympics but the international community had a "moral responsibility" to remind China to be a good host for the August 8-24th Games. Monks first took to the streets of Tibet last Monday to mark the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising, and protests soon spread to adjoining regions inhabited by pockets of Tibetans.