Storming fallout: Panchsheel Marg may be closed

The police were caught unawares when the activists started waving the Tibetan flag and shouted anti-China messages such as “Boycott Beijing Olympics”, reports Vidya Krishnan and Ravi Bajpai.

The immediate fallout of Friday's security breach at the Chinese embassy was that the police were planning to temporarily close down Panchsheel Marg, from where the protesters entered the establishment.

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“We are considering the option,” said Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat. The police said they had also asked the authorities to raise the height of the embassy's boundary wall, which five protesters scaled to enter the rear portion of the diplomatic enclave.

The police said that 33 protesters, including eight women, had been detained. Five of them had actually scaled a wall near the Gate No 7 and entered the cultural office of the embassy undetected on Friday evening.

The protesters had been demonstrating outside the Chinese embassy for more than a week now, shouting slogans against the ongoing turmoil in Lhasa. More than 100 of them had been detained but such a major security lapse had not been reported till now.

Activists said that the protesters reached the embassy in a bus, posing as travelers, at about 5 p.m. “We told the police that we were site-seeing and we swiftly rushed towards the campus. Some of were successfully scaled the wall and barged inside. We were lathi-charged and a few students were injured,” said Dhondup Dorjee, vice-president of the Tibetan Youth Congress.

The police were caught unawares when the activists started waving the Tibetan flag and shouted anti-China messages such as “Boycott Beijing Olympics”. The activists were protesting against the alleged use of violence by the Chinese authorities on peaceful Tibetan protesters.

According to eyewitnesses, the protesters clashed with the police before they were taken into custody. “What the Chinese are doing in Lhasa is wrong and they cannot get away with that,” said Gelek, a Tibetan activist.