Jigme, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, who provided a rare first-hand account of China’s crackdown on Tibetan protesters to foreign media has been arbitrarily arrested by Sangchu County People’s Armed Police(PAP) and Public Security Bureau (PSB) this afternoon from one of the Tibetan homes in Labrang for unknown reason according to confirmed information received by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) from reliable sources.
According to the source, ” Around fifty People Armed Police (PAP) and Public Security Bureau (PSB) officials in several military trucks came to Labrang this afternoon at around 1:00 PM (Beijing Standard Time) and barged into a Tibetan home from where they arrested Jigme and took him away in a military vehicle. And nobody knows where he was taken to and for what reason”.
Jigme Gyatso, a monk of Labrang Monastery in Sangchu County (Ch: Xiahe Xian) Kanlho “Tibet Autonomous Prefecture” (‘TAP’), Gansu Province, was earlier arrested on 22 March 2008 by four armed forces while returning to his monastery from a market and he was known to have been detained and tortured for two months in the detention centre for his suspected role in one of the biggest protests that took place in Labrang on 14 March 2008. He was released on medical ground after months of detention where he was intensively interrogated to extract confession by means of torture that he was left unconscious twice from injuries he suffered.
At the beginning of September, the Voice of America’s Tibetan Service in its Wednesday program Kunleng aired a video from Jigme giving detail accounts of Tibetan people’s aspiration, torture and inhumane treatment meted out to monks of Labrang Monks who were detained during March Protest at the County government headquarters. In a telephone interview with the Associated Press on 12 September, Jigme gave detail accounts of the Chinese crackdown on Tibetans which is still going on months after the events. He later went into hiding fearing authorities’ repercussion for exposing Chinese brutal crackdown on Tibetans.
Monks of Labrang Monastery and other Tibetans in Sangchu took to the streets in large numbers in March to show solidarity with Tibetans demonstrating in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. On 9 April, monks at Labrang Monastery disrupted a government-sponsored media tour and afterwards two monks who defiantly spoke in front of the media have disappeared since then. The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) expresses it strongest condemnation of Chinese security officials’ arbitrary arrest of Jigme for airing the grievances and peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression and opinion. The Centre expresses its deepest concern on the prevailing circumstances on many parts of Tibet, which have been active in the past protests across Tibet