BEIJING: Three Tibetans in China have pleaded guilty to involvement in the death of a prominent religious leader and two other people, a lawyer representing the victims’ families said yesterday, in Tibet’s most closely watched murder case in decades.
Choje Akong Tulku Rinpoche was among the first religious leaders to teach Tibetan Buddhism to followers in the West. He was killed in the south-western Chinese city of Chengdu with his nephew and another Tibetan last October.
They were stabbed to death by three Tibetan men over a financial dispute, Chengdu police said.
“They have admitted to the basic facts of the court’s allegations,” lawyer Xiang Chaoyang said of the three defendants.
Xiang, who is representing the families of the three victims, said the three defendants had disagreed with the court on the nature of the crime.
“They mainly wanted to say it wasn’t intentional,” he said.
The defendants’ lawyer was not available for comment and telephone calls to the Chengdu court went unanswered.
Akong Rinpoche, who lived in exile in Scotland and became a British citizen, was one of the few Tibetan religious leaders who succeeded at balancing the interests of the Chinese government and Tibetans.
He was especially revered by Tibetans in China for his work with charities and in promoting education at the grassroots level, said Robbie Barnett, director of modern Tibet studies at Columbia University.
“Among exiles and many others, this is a major case because of the widespread assumption that there must have been a religious or political plot of some kind behind the murders,” Barnett said.
“So people will be watching carefully to see if there’s been a thorough investigation and a reasonably open trial.”
The questions surrounding Akong Rinpoche’s death underscore the distrust that many Tibetans have of the Chinese government.
Many Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in their homeland, which has been ruled by Beijing since 1950, when Communist troops marched in and announced its “peaceful liberation.”
REUTERS
