Protesting monks storm media tour in western China

A group of 15 Tibetan Buddhist monks interrupted a state-sponsored media tour of a riot-hit region of western China on Wednesday, demanding the return of the Dalai Lama and yelling that they had no human rights.

In the second such incident in as many months, the monks, carrying a banned Tibetan flag, burst out of a building at the Labrang monastery in the town of Xiahe, in the northwestern province of Gansu, and rushed across a plaza to a group of 20 visiting Chinese and foreign journalists.

"The Dalai Lama has to come back to Tibet. We are not asking for Tibetan independence, we are just asking for human rights, we have no human rights now," one monk told the reporters in Chinese.

Many of the monks had their heads covered in robes. They said other monks were still being held by authorities and that armed plainclothes agents were stationed throughout Xiahe.

Hundreds of monks from the Labrang monastery led a march through Xiahe last month, after riots erupted in the Tibetan regional capital Lhasa on March 14.

Last month, about 30 monks stormed a briefing by a temple administrator for a select group of foreign journalists at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, shouting that the reporters were being lied to.

China has said Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and his associates are behind the unrest. The Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in India in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule, has denied the accusation.