Tanak Jigme Sangpo, Tibet’s longest serving political prisoner, was reportedly released on medical parole on March 31, 2002, after serving more than three decades in prison.
The 76-year-old Tanak Jigme Sangpo was first reportedly arrested in 1960 while teaching at the Lhasa Primary School on charges of “corrupting the minds of children with reactionary ideas.” In 1964 he received a second sentence, where he served three years in Sangyip Prison for making comments regarding Chinese repression of Tibetans.
Tanak Jigme was again sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment in Sangyip Prison for ‘counter-revolutionary’ propaganda in 1970. He had been caught attempting to send a document reporting Chinese atrocities to His Holiness the Dalai Lama via his niece, who was trying to flee Tibet. At the age of 53 Tanak Jigme was released from prison in 1979 and transferred to the ‘reform-through-labour’ Unit No 1 in Nyethang, 60 km west of Lhasa.