Visitors recount Tibet violence, tell of troops

By John Ruwitch

CHENGDU, China, March 15 (Reuters) - Lhasa is silent.

With troops and anti-riot vehicles the army has imposed control after a day of chaos and violence in sun-soaked the capital of the Chinese-controlled region of Tibet, normally bustling with tourists and Buddhist pilgrims.

"Today Lhasa is completely closed and there is Chinese military all over," said 58-year-old Danish tourist Bente Walle.

"It looked like a ghost town."

Other foreign visitors said the same about Lhasa, which has been racked by the biggest protests in two decades. The government has announced 10 deaths.

On Friday afternoon, when the protests turned violent, the silver-haired Walle was walking with a guide near the world famous Potala Palace, the empty winter home of the Dalai Lama who has been living in exile since 1959 after a failed uprising.

The first sign of trouble was fire from the Tromsikhang market nearby, Walle said.

"I just saw a lot of fire and everybody was running and my guide told me: 'We've got to run.' So we ran," she said after her flight out touched down in the early afternoon in the southwestern city of Chengdu, the main point of entry for most people going into the Himalayan region.

"Then somebody put us in their house and closed the door. Later on we found a taxi, and the taxi didn't want to go to the place I stayed because there was fighting in the street. So he put us off on the road, and we had to run again.

"In the end it took me 1-½ hours to get to my hostel."

Foreign reporters are banned from Tibet, unless they have permission from the government. All foreigners need special permits to access the remote Himalayan region.

On Friday afternoon, the authorities started to lock down the city, visitors said. Welle described troop lines blocking side streets.

Others said a lockdown was enforced for foreigners.

"We were told that we weren't allowed to leave the hotel. The police called the hotel," said a British visitor, who declined to be identified.

"We were out at the time so we were called back and just stuck it out in the hotel for a few hours and left that night."

The man and several of his travel mates left in the middle of the night for Lhasa's airport, which is an hour or more from the city centre, because "there were reports of people throwing rocks at cars as they were leaving".

He said they were not directly told to leave, but added: "It was strongly suggested that we leave."

People who left Lhasa said they saw scores of Chinese army trucks filled with hundreds of young troops on the streets, and three people said they saw tanks. Reuters was unable to confirm the presence of tanks on the street.

The British visitor said he saw the tanks "in the evening, about 10 o'clock ... downtown, but in the western part of the city about 2 km west of the Potala Palace".

Rainer Ulrich arrived in Lhasa on Friday night by train with 30 other German tourists, including his 11-year-old son and wife. They were told they could not go to the original hotel they had booked in central Lhasa, and a bus took them to another on the outskirts of town.

Ulrich said what he thought were "two or three gunshots" woke him up in the middle of the night.

"I stood up from my bed at four o'clock and I saw two tanks on the streets of Lhasa," he said. "After that I saw 30 or 40 military trucks with soldiers inside."

At 8 a.m. he and his travel mates were bundled on to a bus to Lhasa's airport.

Tibet "was the highlight of the tour here in China," he said. "It's a pity." (Editing by Ben Blanchard)