Beijing - Chinese authorities on Thursday expelled the last two foreign journalists in Tibet. "A high-ranking functionary threatened us with the revocation of our Chinese visas," German Georg Blume said in a telephone interview from Lhasa before he and fellow German Kristin Kupfer were escorted to a train out of Tibet.
Blume, the China correspondent for the weekly German newspaper Die Zeit and the Berlin daily taz, said he and Kupfer, a correspondent for the Austrian magazine Profil, had resisted five days of police calls for them to leave the Himalayan region after demonstrations and violence broke out in Lhasa March 14.
"We were told today in an intimidating manner that if we did not go now, we would encounter large problems, namely over our visas," Blume said Thursday.
Earlier, James Miles, the correspondent for the British Economist magazine was ordered out of Tibet and several Hong Kong journalist were also expelled Monday.
Attempts by the German embassy and EU ambassador in Beijing to persuade Beijing to allow the journalists to remain were unsuccessful.
The violence involving Tibetan pro-independence demonstrators and Chinese forces was touched off by the 49th anniversary of the failed uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule on March 10.
The central government has confirmed 13 deaths during rioting Friday in Lhasa, and the Tibetan government in exile said it had confirmed the death of at least 80 people there. Exile groups have also reported deaths in violence in other parts of Tibet as well as outside the region.
