Lobsang Tsering

Lobsang Tsering walks down the street in Ngaba holding a portrait of the Dalai Lama.

A Tibetan man named Lobsang Tsering was detained following a solo protest in Ngaba earlier this month. Lobsang Tsering, who is a monk at Kirti monastery in his twenties, has been held incommunicado since then.

Lobsang Tsering 16.6.7On the afternoon of June 7, [2016], Lobsang Tsering held a portrait of the Dalai Lama and called for freedom in Tibet and the long life of the Dalai Lama as he walked down the main street in Ngaba county town in Ngaba (Chinese: Aba) Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan (part of the Tibetan area of Amdo). According to monks from Kirti monastery in exile in India, Lobsang Tsering belongs to the Kalachakra College, one of the four main monastic colleges at Kirti.

Ngaba prefecture has been the scene of at least 10 solo protests by Tibetans over the last year, and several have occurred in neighboring Kardze (Chinese: Ganzi) prefecture as well. Ngaba town is where the Tibetan self-immolation protests began in 2009 when a Kirti monk named Tapey set himself on fire, and it has been the site of more than 30 since then.