Pizzas galore!

The use of live rounds was a last resort, the Xinhua news agency said, without specifying how the Tibetan demonstrators had injured the official. It said: “Police were forced to fire warning shots and put down the violence, since local officials and people were in great danger.”

Pro-Tibet activists said the incident erupted after the chief monk turned away the officials on Wednesday, and they returned the following day backed by a squad of paramilitary police. They said the police had opened fire when demonstrators, expecting the two detainees to be freed by 8pm, confronted the security at a roadblock outside the temple.

Yesterday armed paramilitary police patrolled the streets of the village and surrounded the monastery. All communications had been cut.

Pictures of the Dalai Lama have been banned in China since the mid-1990s when the exiled monk enraged Beijing by announcing that, working with an abbot of a major monastery in Tibet, he had identified the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama — Tibet’s spiritual leader — who died in 1989. That boy disappeared and the Communist Party oversaw a new search in which another child was installed as the reincarnation.

However, many monks and ordinary Tibetans still keep pictures of the Dalai Lama in their homes or hidden on the corner of temple altars.

The new search appears to be part of a policy by the Government to try to suppress the anti-Chinese unrest. On Thursday paramilitary police entered the Drangko monastery in Sichuan — where a policeman and two Tibetans died in clashes on March 24 — in a hunt for banned photographs. Witnesses said that the police threw the pictures on the ground and stamped on them.

The latest upsurge of violence highlights the difficulties the Chinese authorities are facing in trying to end almost a month of protests across the Tibetan region and the depth of anti-Chinese sentiment among a deeply Buddhist minority loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama. It comes just as the issue of unrest has become a focus for activists around the world who are criticising China’s human rights record as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Beijing in August.

The latest violence must also cast a shadow over Beijing’s plans to reopen the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, to tourists by May 1.

Before Thursday’s violence, the security forces appeared to have regained control of the vast areas of the country. In Lhasa, police issued their Number 13 most wanted list, bringing to 79 the number of people still sought for their roles in a riot on March 14 when Tibetans rampaged through the streets of the Tibetan capital, stabbing and stoning ethnic Han Chinese and setting fire to hundreds of shops and offices. At least 18 people died.

Lhasa authorities sent out a text message to the mobile phones of all residents yesterday, offering a reward of 20,000 yuan (£1,300) to anyone giving information leading to the arrest of those wanted for the violence.

The unrest has spilled quickly since monks from a monastery on the edge of Lhasa first tried to stage a peaceful demonstration on March 10 to mark the anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile in 1959. Since then, violence has been reported in several provinces with large Tibetan populations.

Two monks in Sichuan province have committed suicide, according to Tibetan sources. One aged 32 hanged himself in his room at Geerten monastery on March 27, leaving a signed suicide note. Another, aged 72, from Guomang temple, was apparently upset after being detained while en route to a religious ceremony with his disciples. He returned to his monastery and killed himself.

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