BEIJING – A Chinese court rejected the appeal of Tibetan monk Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche against a suspended death sentence on charges of setting off bombs and inciting separatism, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.
It gave no details of the Sichuan Higher People’s Court ruling on the appeal by the monk, who has protested his innocence in a tape Radio Free Asia said was made in his jail cell.
A suspended death sentence is usually commuted to life imprisonment in China.
Xinhua said Lobsang Dhondup, tried alongside the monk in December, had not appealed the straightforward death sentence imposed on him. It described Lobsang Dhondup as a farmer. Overseas human rights group say he is a religious teacher.
The U.S.-government backed Radio Free Asia quoted Tenzin Deleg Rinpoche as saying in a tape recording he had only heard about the bombings for which he was arrested.
One judge who decided the original case said the monk had confessed to five of the six explosions between 1998 and 2002 in the Tibetan-populated Garze area of the southwestern province of Sichuan, it said.
There has been sporadic violence in Tibet, where many people resent what they see as Chinese occupation since the People’s Liberation Army marched in and imposed Communist rule in 1950.
