Many still held after Tibet riots, Amnesty says

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's grip on dissent in Tibet remains tight after deadly riots there in March, with more than 1,000 people still detained without charge, human rights group Amnesty International said in a new report on Thursday.

China promptly dismissed the group as lacking credibility.

The anti-China disturbances which broke out in Lhasa and nearby Tibetan areas posed the sharpest political challenge to Chinese rule in the Himalayan region for decades, sparking global anti-China protests ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August.

"Many hundreds, possibly thousands, of Tibetans languish in prisons or detention centers without the government publicly acknowledging their whereabouts or formally charging them with a criminal offence," the report read.

Many had been denied access to family and lawyers in a violation of international human rights conventions, it said.

"This is really a call to the Chinese government to actually provide that information and, if people are detained, explain why they're being detained," Sam Zarifi, Amnesty's Asia-Pacific director, told Reuters by telephone from London.

"Either charge them and put them on fair trial or release them immediately," he added.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said she had not seen the Amnesty International report.

"But it is well known that this organization has always been biased against China and has regularly issued irresponsible reports to attack China," Jiang told a news briefing.

"I think what they said has not a shred of credibility."

Amnesty also urged China to end an information blackout in Tibetan regions by granting free access to journalists and other foreign observers, including U.N. human rights experts.

Jiang said organizers of the Beijing Games had been "actively" arranging for foreign reporters to cover the Olympic torch relay in Lhasa on Saturday.

(Reporting by James Pomfret in Hong Kong and Guo Shipeng in Beijing; Editing by Roger Crabb)