At least five people on the death roll given by the Dalai Lama clique after riots in Lhasa and other ethnic Tibetan areas last month have been proven alive or non-existent, police said on Sunday after investigation.

The Dalai clique on March 25 released the "names and details of 40 identified people" who "died" in the riots. However, the Lhasa police bureau found five persons on the list with detailed residences were still alive or did not exist at all.

The other 35 people, whom the clique failed to give detailed residence but just roughly mentioned their residence place as "Lhasa, Tibet" or "Aba, Sichuan Province", were impossible to be located, the police said.

The Dalai clique announced the death of a 31-year-old Lobsang Tsepel in Sera Monastery. However, the police investigation found the monk, 36, was still in the temple.

The investigation said there were altogether 12 people named Ngodup in Tibet University, and all of them were at work, while the Dalai clique said a 28-year-old was killed.

A Lobsang Doma in Garu Nunnery was 39 and alive, not 23 and dead as said by the Dalai clique.

There was not a person named Rigzin Choenyi in the Shugseb Nunnery of Lhasa, while the nunnery has two people whose names included the Rigzin part but were both alive.

There was not a person named Ngawang Thekchen in Taklung Drak Monastery, according to the investigation.

The Dalai clique's death roll, however, did not include the 18 civilians and one police officer in Lhasa who were killed by mobs in the riot in March 14, the Lhasa police bureau said.

The list is totally fake and meant to conceal the violence masterminded by the Dalai clique, the bureau added.

The death toll released from the northern India hilltop town Dharamsala, however, has been ever so confusing. It varied between 99 and "hundreds" for two weeks before the "government in exile" decided to put it somewhere between 135 and 140.

Oeser, a deputy to the national legislature and also director of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Department of Supervision, said "the death tolls were self-contradictory and purely fabricated. The clique tried to spread fallacies to deceive people."

China's Ministry of Public Security said on Tuesday that it had gathered sufficient evidences, including connections between rioters and the Dalai clique, showing that March 14 riots in Lhasa were not isolated or accidental but was part of the "Tibetan People's Uprising Movement" plotted by the Dalai clique.

Solid facts showed that the unrest in Lhasa was organized, premeditated, masterminded and instigated by the Dalai clique and its "Tibet independence" forces, the ministry said.

The unrest in Lhasa, involving beating, smashing, ransacking and arson, spread to Sichuan and Gansu Provinces, leaving shops looted, government offices damaged, as well as deaths and injuries.

(Xinhua News Agency April 7, 2008)