Dharamshala — Chinese police detained a Tibetan monk named Losel from Sera monastery in Lhasa, Tibet, on suspicion of sharing information about Tibet with Tibetans in exile. He died as a result of the beatings, ill-treatment and torture he suffered during his detention.
Losel, aged 38, Tibetan monk from Sera monastery (in Tibetan: Sara Thekchen Ling), detained by the Chinese police in May 2024 on suspicion of having shared information about Tibet with Tibetans in exile. Subsequently, the Chinese police did not inform his family members of his whereabouts, and the family members were unable to find out where he was being held due to the lack of transparency on the part of the Chinese police and their biased treatment of Tibetans.
He was harshly beaten and tortured during interrogation by Chinese police, as they usually do with Tibetans. He died after five months of inhuman treatment and torture by the Chinese police during his detention, a source confirmed. Where he was being detained, who beaten him and why he was arrested are not known, due to the tight control exercised by the Chinese government over the flow of information from Tibet and the fear of being arrested by the Chinese police, as Losel was.
The Chinese Communist police handed his body over to his family in Lhasa on October 21, 2024, without explaining the cause of his death, and also warned his family not to talk about his death to people outside of Tibet. Losel was born in 1986 in the village of Tsotoe, in Phenpo county (in Chinese: Linzhou county), in western Tibet. He became a monk at a very young age at Sera monastery, near Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Sera monastery is one of the most important Buddhist monasteries in Tibet.
The Chinese government detains, arrests, imprisons and even kills Tibetans like Losel and Lhamo, who are simply exercising their freedom of expression by writing about Tibet in Tibetan, preserving the Tibetan language, keeping and sharing photos and books of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and publishing books outside Tibet.
China-Tibet: The one-thing you need to know
Over the past 70 decades, there has been ongoing political repression, social discrimination, economic marginalization, environmental destruction, and cultural assimilation, particularly due to Chinese migration to Tibet which is fueling intense resentment among the people of occupied Tibet.
The communist-totalitarian state of China began its invasion of Tibet in 1949, reaching complete occupation of the country in 1959. Since that time, more than 1.2 million people, 20% of the nation's population of six million, have died as a direct result of China's invasion and occupation. In addition, over 99% of Tibet's six thousand religious monasteries, temples, and shrines, have been looted or decimated resulting in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sacred Buddhist scriptures.
Until 1949, Tibet was an independent Buddhist nation in the Himalayas which had little contact with the rest of the world. It existed as a rich cultural storehouse of the Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings of Buddhism. Religion was a unifying theme among the Tibetans -- as was their own language, literature, art, and world view developed by living at high altitudes, under harsh conditions, in a balance with their environment.
