Tibetan Singer Missing After Arrest By Chinese Officials

A well-known Tibetan singer has not been seen for more than a week after she was arrested by Chinese security forces in last month's anti-government protests, her husband has said.

Lamao Jia said his wife, Jamyang Kyi, who has performed extensively abroad, was detained in Xining in Qinghai province on April 1 and that he had not sen her since April 7.

Jia, who works with his wife at the Tibetan-language section of the state-run Qinghai TV, told the Associated Press he did not know who had taken his wife into custody. "Everything is a mess right now," he said.

Police in Xining referred the Guardian's inquiries to Qinghai's public security bureau, where staff requested that questions be faxed to them, but they did not respond.

The detention was reported by the United States government-funded radio Free Asia, which cited unidentified sources in Beijing saying police had arrested Jamyang Kyi.

It said security services had been questioning large numbers of Tibetans who had traveled internationally. Kyi has performed alongside exiles in overseas concerts, but not explicitly supported groups calling for autonomy for Tibetans.

Matt Whitticase, a spokesman for the Free Tibet campaign, said: "People with no apparent connections at all to any activism appear to be being detained."

Large parts of western China saw unrest in the wake of the riots in Lhasa,and a heavy security presence remains. Almost half of China's six millionTibetans live outside the autonomous region, in provinces including Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan.

Journalists trying to visit areas of unrest are still being turned back or removed, making it almost impossible to verify claims of detentions and deaths during protests.

Exile groups allege that police shot dead eight protesters in a clash in Garze, Sichuan, on April 3, but no journalist reached the town until this week. A reporter from the Japanese news agency Kyodo was trailed by police during his visit.

He said he saw posters in Garze offering rewards of up to 100,000 yuan (£7,225) - a huge sum by Chinese standards - for information on the demonstration's organizers and photographers.

A monk in the town claimed police had targeted those taking pictures of the protest as they fired, adding: "The government is lying, and that is whyit is afraid of pictures becoming known to the outside world."