Tibet deaths, arrests and protests shadow Olympics

By Chris Buckley and Lindsay Beck

BEIJING (Reuters) - At least two people have died in fresh protests in a Tibetan part of western China, reports said on Tuesday, as authorities made arrests in Tibet's capital Lhasa in an effort to reassert control over the restive region.

State media said one police officer was killed and the exiled Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy reported one Tibetan protester was shot dead and another critically hurt after unrest in Sichuan's Ganzi (Garze) Tibetan Prefecture.

"The police were forced to fire warning shots, and dispersed the lawless mobsters," the brief Xinhua news agency report said, without mentioning any deaths of protesters, who it said attacked with rocks and knives.

The latest news of unrest and arrests came after protesters on Monday tried to put pressure on Beijing by disrupting the Olympic Games torch-lighting ceremony in Greece, an act Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang called disgraceful.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged China on Tuesday to show responsibility over the unrest and refused to rule out a possible boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games.

"I don't close the door to any option, but I think it's more prudent to reserve my responses to concrete developments in the situation," Sarkozy said, when asked about a possible boycott.

In Washington, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, reacting to Sarkozy's remarks on the Olympics, said there was no change in Bush's plans to attend the Games.

"We believe that China should respect minority cultures -- particularly in this case, the Tibetan culture -- and we want to make sure that there is freedom of the press and international access to the area," Perino said.