China flight returns after "suspicious" behavior

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese flight was called back after take-off because of the suspicious behavior of a single Han Chinese passenger, police said on Monday, not that of several Tibetans as local media originally reported.

The flurry of speculation about what forced the flight to return underscored the security anxieties in China ahead of the Olympic Games, with the government making near-daily warnings about threats from Tibetan and Muslim groups.

The Southern Metropolis Daily had reported that police detained five people, possibly Tibetans, after they both made "suspicious remarks" and spoke in a language that "others could not understand".

But the real problem was a Han Chinese man talking incessantly on his mobile phone, the Shenzhen police station said in a faxed statement to Reuters.

The flight left the southern city of Shenzhen on Sunday afternoon bound for Chengdu, capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan.

The detained man "was fairly excitable, making non-stop calls on his mobile phone to relatives and friends", the police statement said.

When asked by a flight attendant to quiet down, the man said "read the news tomorrow", a reply that alarmed the flight attendant, the police added.

Four other passengers were also taken for questioning but only as witnesses to the disruption, the statement said. It did not say their ethnicity.

China has tightened security of its airways after foiling what it said was a plot last month by Muslim Uighur separatists to blow up a plane.

The government has also warned that Tibetan groups were plotting attacks after deadly anti-Chinese riots in Tibet and Tibetan-populated areas of neighboring provinces, including Sichuan, last month.

China has blamed the Dalai Lama for orchestrating the violence, a charge that the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader has repeatedly denied.

The Dalai Lama has said that the Chinese media's portrayal of the troubles in Tibet could sow the seeds of racial tension between Tibetans and Han Chinese.

(Reporting by Guo Shipeng and Simon Rabinovitch; Editing by Alex Richardson)