From the Electronic Telegraph:

A HUMAN rights group investigating the fate of five nuns who committed suicide in a Tibetan prison two years ago has said that they were driven to their deaths by weeks of torture by Chinese authorities.

The claims of the Tibet Information Network centre on the bleak prison of Drapchi, just north of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, where in May 1998 a pro-independence protest took place. It was there, in a yard between the jail's inner and outer gates, that officials chose to welcome the British ambassador and two European colleagues as they investigated human rights in Tibet.

The ambassadors recorded being puzzled about their briefing outside the main prison. Only later did they learn that their visit coincided with bloody protests inside.

Now the TIN has pieced together the full story of those protests, which ended with more than a dozen dead and the group suicide of the nuns, apparently driven to despair by beatings and electric shocks. As the ambassadors were being briefed, paramilitary police were beating female political prisoners just yards away, TIN says.

Prison authorities were in a rage. For the second time in four days, inmates had refused to sing Socialism is Good and other patriotic songs as the Chinese flag was raised, and instead shouted pro-independence slogans. For the second time they were beaten.

One of the nuns told TIN, an openly pro-Tibet group: "They beat us so savagely that there was blood everywhere, on the walls and on the floor. It looked like an abattoir. They beat us with their belts, until their belts broke. Then they used electric batons. Some [of us] had torn ears, others had wounds in their heads."

There followed a week of interrogations, in which suspected ringleaders report being stripped and given electric shocks and beatings with sand-filled hoses. Finally, the nuns were ordered into an exercise yard to stand stock-still in the summer sunshine for four days.

On the fifth day five nuns, ranging in age from 22 to 28, were found dead in a storeroom. They had hanged themselves or suffocated themselves by "swallowing their scarves". Inmates being released were later threatened with re-imprisonment if they ever talked of what they had seen.

TIN's new research centres on the female inmates of Unit Three of Drapchi prison. It offers glimpses of a campaign of hunger strikes, protests and official retaliation lasting several years. Buddhist nuns tell of failed attempts to make prisoners salute China's flag and sing of their love for Mao Tse-tung, and of the beatings provoked by their resistance.

Court papers collected by TIN detail the crimes for which nuns and monks serve so many years: pasting protest posters on monastery walls, scattering leaflets or shouting "reactionary slogans". Fifty years ago tomorrow, on Oct 7, 1950, Chinese Communist troops crossed the borders of Tibet, sweeping aside pitiful defences "out of the Middle Ages", in the words of one British observer.

Within the year China had forced the young Dalai Lama and his government to sign a document paving the way for "peaceful liberation", under which Tibet was occupied in line with ancient Chinese claims to sovereignty over the Himalayan kingdom.

Chinese terror in Tibet reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution, when all religious institutions and artefacts were outlawed, clerics were murdered, temples demolished and countless treasures melted down or shipped to Chinese vaults.

The new accounts present a rare glimpse of real life in Tibet, a story that is blighted by rewritten history and propaganda. Foreign journalists based in China are forbidden to set foot there, except for rare, heavily guarded delegations. Foreign diplomats can see little more.

Beijing routinely denies human rights abuses in Tibet and points to new roads, factories and hospitals as evidence of its "benevolent" rule. But for the country's two and a half million people Tibet is where China looks, and acts, like the dictatorship it still is.