New Violence Reported in Tibetan Area, 'Anti-Cnn' Site Launched

New violence has broken out in a volatile Tibetan region of western China, leaving eight people dead, an overseas Tibet activist group said Friday. China's official Xinhua News Agency said a government official was seriously injured.
The London-based Free Tibet Campaign said police opened fire on hundreds of Buddhist monks and lay people who had marched on local government offices to demand the release of two monks detained for possessing photographs of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled Buddhist leader.
Xinhua made no mention of deaths or injuries among protesters, but said a "riot" had flared up Thursday night outside government offices in the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture high in the mountains in Sichuan province along the border with Tibet.
It said the official was "attacked and seriously wounded," and said police were "forced to fire warning shots and put down the violence." No other details were given.

Tibet will be reopened to tourists on May 1, a decision announced Thursday even as authorities showed no sign of lifting restrictions preventing foreign journalists from freely visiting Tibet and other Tibetan regions in western China to report on episodes of ethnic unrest.
Meanwhile, Communist Party officials in Tibet plan trials this month for people arrested in the violence. Wang Xiangming, a deputy Communist Party secretary in Lhasa, the capital, said more than 1,200 people would be prosecuted, according to accounts in the Chinese and Hong Kong news media.
Tibet has been closed to domestic and foreign tourists since March 16, two days after violent riots erupted in Lhasa.

China on Friday vowed swift and severe punishment of Tibetans accused of rioting and participation in anti-government protests last month, amid signs of spreading unrest in Muslim areas of western China.
Quoting Tibet's highest law enforcement official, the official Tibet Daily newspaper said that courts would "use the weapon of the law to attack enemies, punish crime, protect the people and maintain stability," in what it called a drive to "shock criminality and root out the base of the separatists."
Tibet was shaken by protests last month by Buddhist monks demanding religious freedoms. Riots followed in the provincial capital Lhasa, on March 14, in which shops owned by the country's ethnic Han majority were attacked and 19 people were killed according to official reports.

China's top law and order official in Tibet has called on judges in the remote region to swiftly try and judge Tibetans accused of involvement in recent rare anti-government unrest.
According to a report Friday in the official Tibet Daily,Baima Chilin told judges in Tibet that they have the confidence of theCommunist party and urged them to use evidence to reveal the truthabout the unrest. He also told judges to use the weapon of the law toattack its enemies and punish those who have committed crimes toprotect the public and maintain stability.