Home > News Archive > Exile government releases Chinese torture footage

Exile government releases Chinese torture footage

By Lobsang Wangyal | Tibet Sun

The Tibetan government-in-exile released rare footages of police beating of protesters, suffering and death of a captive, and Para-military presence in Lhasa, on 20 March 2009.Video grab/TGIE/India

The Tibetan government-in-exile released rare footage of Chinese police beating Tibetan protesters, the torture and death of a captive, and military presence in Lhasa, and said Tibet still remains under virtual martial law.

The pictures are highly disturbing and graphic, and these are first such images that managed to come to the outside world, testifying to the true situation in Tibet since 2008.

The footage directly challenges China’s persistent denial that it uses torture upon Tibetan civilians.

China’s crackdown last year on Tibetan protesters left at least 220 Tibetans dead, over 1,294 seriously injured, over 5,600 detained and more than 1,000 disappeared, the exile government reported.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected the report from the United Nations panel on torture and human rights on the use of torture by Chinese police, calling the report as “untrue and slanderous” in November 2008, and accused the committee members as “prejudiced” against China.

Pictures in three sections showed arrests and beatings of captive protesters in Lhasa on 14 March 2008, inhumane treatment and the subsequent death of a youth, and the heavy presence of security forces in Lhasa in the run up to the 50th Anniversary of 10 March Tibetan Uprising Day.

The second section showed Tendar, a deputy in the China Mobile company, who tried to stop Chinese police officials from beating a lone monk on 14 March 2008, when he was on his way to his office.

He was brutally beaten and later suffered inhumane treatment at the hands of Chinese authorities.

He was fired at, burned with cigarette butts, pierced with a nail in his right foot, and severely beaten with an electric baton. The wounds and the bruise marks visible on his body are a testimony of the brutality to which he was subjected to by the Chinese police.

The doctors and the nurses who treated Tendar after his release from prison were shocked upon seeing the rotten wounds and bruises on his body when he was admitted to the Tibet Autonomous Region People’s Hospital. Denial of basic medical care at the military hospital was obvious.

His wounds rotted due to covering them with polythene sheets.

The hospital had to remove about 2.5 kg of his body part in order to clean out the decay.

All efforts to cure him with huge expenses by his family failed. He died on 19 June 2008.

When his corpse was offered to the vultures according to the tradition, a nail was found in his right foot.

The footages can be download at: http://footage.tibetanbridges.com/

Copyright © 2009 Tibet Sun

Published in Tibet Sun