Visitor stops crowd beating up trio
A Canadian visitor was walking on Beijing Road in Lhasa on Friday afternoon when he saw a crowd of Tibetans beating a young Han Chinese man and two women.
At first he watched, stunned, as the crowd, armed with sticks and metal clubs, beat the man, aged about 20, until he fell to the ground unconscious.
Then he recalled rioters in Paris beating him to the ground and leaving him with a dislocated shoulder.
'I told myself, 'I can't just let this guy die on the ground,' the man said yesterday by phone from Lhasa. 'I remembered what happened to me. I couldn't let that happen to somebody else.'
When he intervened, the Tibetans stopped their attack.
'The rioters had a lot of anger, but I don't think they actually wanted to kill anybody,' he said.
He lifted the man to his feet and helped him stumble towards a hospital. 'He must have passed out four times on the way to the hospital. As soon as he got in the door, he collapsed,' he said.
He also took along the two young women, one of whom had lost several teeth.
'Women didn't get it as bad as men, but they still took a beating. A lot of people took rocks and sticks and clubs to the head.'
At the hospital, he saw no corpses, but a half-dozen victims with cuts and bruises from beatings.
As he returned to his guest house, he saw at least 15 stores burned or smashed.
'They torched the roof of the store across from us. It's just a few gutted walls now,' he said.
Yesterday he was confined to the guest house, where police guarded the reception. 'We don't know how long we're going to be stuck here. They're giving us two meals a day, that's about it.'
