Beijing: Chinese authorities said 381 people involved in "riots" in a Tibetan-populated area of southwest Sichuan province had surrendered to police, the official Xinhua news agency has said.

The 381 people in remote Ngawa county, known as Aba in Chinese, turned themselves in by noon today, the brief Xinhua dispatch said last night.

Authorities said last week that 105 people had surrendered in the Tibetan capital Lhasa, where a week of protests by Tibetans against China s rule of their homeland erupted into violence on March 14.

Protests then spilled into other parts of China with significant ethnic Tibetan populations, including Sichuan province.

Demonstrations erupted in Ngawa county on March 16.

China has said that police shot and wounded four people "in self-defence" during those protests, but activist groups say at least eight Tibetans were killed by security forces in Ngawa.

As many as 20 may have been killed, according to the US and India-based Students For a Free Tibet.

The groups circulated photos of dead bodies with apparent bullet wounds to back up their allegations that Chinese forces were using lethal force.

The veracity of the photos could not be independently verified by AFP.

The protests started in Lhasa to mark the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule, which had begun in 1951 after communist troops moved into the Buddhist region to "liberate" it.

Source : PTI