A group of Tibetan monks disrupted an official news briefing at a key temple in Lhasa on Thursday, accusing Chinese authorities of lying after more than two weeks of unrest in the Himalayan region, witnesses said.
The Chinese government brought a select group of foreign and Chinese reporters to Lhasa on Wednesday for a stage managed three-day tour of the city that was rocked by anti-Chinese violence on March 14 to show that stability had been restored.
The group of monks at the Jokhang Temple, the most sacred temple in Tibet and a top tourist stop in central Lhasa, barged into a briefing by the head of the temple's administrative office.
"About 30 young monks burst into the official briefing, shouting: 'Don't believe them. They are tricking you. They are telling lies'," USA Today reporter Callum MacLeod said by telephone from Lhasa.
Another reporter said some of the monks asserted that they had been unable to leave the Jokhang Temple since March 10.
A third journalist on the trip, Wang Che-nan, a cameraman for Taiwan's ETTV said the incident lasted about 15 minutes, after which unarmed police took the Tibetans to another area of the temple, away from the journalists.
It was unclear what happened to them next, the reporter said. Police and government minders did not confiscate notes or film from reporters but told them to move on. "They said: 'Your time is up, time to go to the next place'," Wang said.
Reuters was not invited on the government-run trip.
The state-run Xinhua news agency said only that the media tour had been "disrupted" by monks, known as lamas in Tibet, but that it got back on track swiftly and that Lhasa was returning to normal after the unrest.
The Tibetan unrest and China's response are at the centre of an international storm ahead of the Olympics in August.
U.S. President George W. Bush encouraged Chinese President Hu Jintao on Wednesday to talk with the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader.
Hu said the monk must renounce support for independence of Tibet and Taiwan and stop encouraging violence and illegal activities aimed at harming the Olympics.
