A Chinese court sentenced to death two ethnic Tibetans...

A Chinese court sentenced to death two ethnic Tibetans accused of setting off a series of bombs in the southwest of the country near Tibet.
An intermediate court in Tibetan-populated Garze Prefecture, in Sichuan province, convicted the men on charges of detonating bombs, promoting independence and illegally possessing guns and explosives on December 2, a court official said.
Tibet and nearby areas have been hit by sporadic bombings linked to pro-independence forces fighting what they see as Chinese occupation of Tibet since the People's Liberation Army marched in and imposed Communist rule in 1950.
The official said the court had imposed a straightforward death sentence on one of the men, whose name in Chinese is pronounced Luorang Dengzhu.
The other, whose name is pronounced Ahan Zhaxi, was given a death sentence suspended for two years. Such sentences are usually commuted to life in prison.
"I do not have any details about their respective cases," he said in reference to the differing sentences.
The semi-official China News Service said police captured Luorang Dengzhu as he tried to flee after a blast which injured several people on April 3 in a public square in the Sichuan city of Chengdu.
Police found pro-independence leaflets scattered at the scene, it quoted a local newspaper as saying.
Investigators later blamed Luorang Dengzhu and Ahan Zhaxi for a string of similar incidents in Garze's Kangding county in which one person was killed and another seriously injured, it said.
Kangding was the site of a blast which injured three people in 2001 and was linked by a New York-based Tibetan rights group to a crackdown on a Buddhist temple and academy nearby.