Japan says no to Chinese torch guards - reports

Reuters

Torch runners surrounded by police officers and Chinese security personnel as they carry the flame during the Olympic Torch Relay in San Francisco this week.

Japan will not allow the squad of Chinese flame guards to intervene with the Beijing Olympic torch's progress when it arrives in a Japanese city this month, the national police head was quoted as saying yesterday.

"We should not violate the principle that the Japanese police will firmly maintain security," Kyodo news agency quoted Shinya Izumi, head of the National Public Safety Commission, as saying.

"We do not know what position the people who escorted the relay are in," Izumi was quoted as saying in the media.

"If they are for the consideration of security, it is our role."

The torch is set to arrive in Nagano, central Japan, where the Winter Games were hosted in 1998, on April 26, after passing through Buenos Aires, Mumbai and Canberra, among other cities.

The phalanx of large and physically fit Chinese men in blue-and-white track suits has been trotting besides the torch along its ambitious global torch route and turned off the flame several times in Paris earlier this week.

Chinese state media have reported that the "flame protection squad", consisting of some 70 members of China's People's Armed Police, has been employed by the Beijing Olym-pic Organising Committee to safeguard the fire for 24 hours a day.

But the squad's heavy-handed approach in managing the relay, which has been a magnet for chaotic demonstrations in London, Paris and San Francisco over China's human rights record and recent government crackdown on monk-led protests in Tibet, has made some uncomfortable.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has said that Australia, not China, would be the one to provide security for the flame.

Kenya Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai has pulled out of the Tanzanian leg of the Olympic torch relay this weekend to highlight human rights concerns in Tibet. Maathai, a veteran of Kenya's civil rights movement who won the Nobel prize in 2004 for her environmental work, was meant to carry the torch tomorrow in the Indian Ocean port of Dar es Salaam.

"I think all of us who care about human rights issues are very concerned about the events that have been unfolding in Tibet," she said.