Police: Followers Of Tibet Leader Broke Indian Law

NEW DELHI (AP) - Followers of Tibetan Buddhism's third most important leader violated Indian tax and foreign currency laws in collecting donations, police said Saturday.

Santosh Patial, a police officer heading the investigation, said it was still too early to say whether the leader, the Karmapa, was also involved in the transactions.

Indian officials are trying to trace the source of $1.35 million dollars found last week in a raid on the Karmapa's headquarters near Dharmsala in northern India.

Police and revenue officials searched the Gyuto Tantric Monastery and twice questioned Ugyen Thinley Dorje, the 17th Karmapa, and his aides about the source of the money, which was in a range of foreign currencies.

The Karmapa Office of Administration issued a statement Friday night adamantly denying Indian media reports that the Buddhist leader might be a Chinese agent sent to India to control exiled Tibetan Buddhists who have made their home there.

It also denied reports that the Karmapa had acquired lands along the Sino-Indian border.

Last week's raid on the monastery followed the arrest of two Indians who were found carrying 10 million rupees ($220,200) in cash they said had been given to them by a monk with links to Gyuto to buy a piece of land in northern Himachal Pradesh state, where Dharmsala is located.

The raid was unprecedented and particularly surprising since the Karmapa is revered by Tibetans and Buddhists across India. India has gone to great lengths to provide asylum to Buddhist leaders who have fled Tibet, including the top spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Representatives of the Karmapa - who is a member of a different religious order from the Dalai Lama - say the money was donated by followers who visited the monastery to seek his blessings.

"The Karmapa does not even look at these offerings which are handed over to the monastery accounts office," Karma Topden, the Karmapa's spokesman, said this past week.

Police, however, believe the amounts of cash were too large to be only from donations, and said they violated Indian tax and foreign currency laws that say large amounts of foreign money must be declared and cannot be held privately.

"The followers have not followed the rules," Patial told The Associated Press.

The Karmapa, 24, left Tibet in 2000. Since then, he has been living in the monastery in Sidhbari, just outside Dharmsala, which has been the headquarters of the self-declared Tibetan government-in-exile since the Dalai Lama fled the Himalayan region in 1959.

China's government reviles the Dalai Lama, accusing him of pushing for independence for Tibet and sowing trouble there. A boy named by the Dalai Lama as the second-highest Tibetan spiritual leader, the Panchen Lama, in 1995 disappeared shortly afterward and China selected another boy.