Video images of Chinese police beating Tibetans as they lie trussed-up on the ground may have prompted the country’s censors to block access to YouTube, the popular video-sharing website.

The video released by the Tibetan “government-in-exile” at the weekend quickly made its way on to the site, which has been freely accessible in China since before the Beijing Olympics in August last year.

China has offered no official confirmation that it has blocked the California-based website, or any reason why it might want to bar its people from seeing images available on it.

However, Beijing has said that the video issued from the Dalai Lama’s base in exile in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala was largely fabricated. The Government’s Xinhua news agency said that the footage had been spliced together from various sources.

The video itself makes clear that it contains three sets of pictures. The first shows paramilitary People’s Armed Police storming the Jokhang temple in the heart of Lhasa during a riot in 1988. The police hit out at fleeing maroon-robed monks in Tibet’s holiest site, beating one to the floor.

This video was shot by police during the 1988 riot as a record of the events for the authorities in Beijing and is the most revealing footage of violence in Lhasa to make its way out of China.

The exiles say that the second clip was shot in or near Lhasa soon after the riot on March 14 last year when Tibetans protesting against Chinese rule rampaged through the city’s streets, setting fire to shops and offices and leaving 22 people dead. Paramilitary security forces are seen dragging Tibetans, including several monks, on the ground after they have been arrested.

Their hands and wrists tied with rope, the Tibetans can be heard moaning as paramilitaries hit them with sticks. One man has his wrist tied over his shoulder to his other hand in an agonising position. The police can be heard speaking in Chinese with a heavy regional accent.

The final part, the most gruesome, shows a Tibetan man identified as Tendar being treated by hospital doctors after he was beaten and tortured for trying to stop a monk being attacked in the 2008 protests.

A statement from the Tibetan exiles said that the China Mobile employee was fired at, burnt with cigarette butts and beaten with an electric baton by security forces before his wounds were wrapped in polythene and left to rot. When he reached a civilian hospital doctors cut away 2.5kg (5½lb) of rotten flesh. He died on June 19 last year.

Xinhua said that the man in the video was not Tendar and his wounds had been faked.

It may be no coincidence that the blocking of YouTube occurred around the anniversary of the Tibetan unrest. The site was blocked last year from March 15 to 23 — starting the day after the riot in Lhasa.

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