DHARAMSHALA, November 24: Jadrel Rinpoche Jampa Trinley, the former Abbot of Tashi Lhunpo monastery and the leader of the search party for the 11th Panchen Lama, is feared dead.
The website of the Central Tibetan Administration reported that news about Jadrel Rinpoche’s suspected death was revealed in recently emerged taped message from one of his close associates inTibet. The source in Tibet feared that Jadrel Rinpoche died because of poisoining.
Rinpoche was appointed as head of the Search Party Committee to identify the XIth Panchen Lama by Beijing but was later detained in May 1995 after Chinese officials discovered that he had communicated his finding to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and sought his advice.
Days before Jadrel Rinpoche’s detention, on May 14, 1995, His Holiness the Dalai Lama had announced Gedhun Choekyi Nyima as a true reincarnation of the xth Panchen Lama. Three days after the announcement, the six-year-old boy identified by the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama, disappeared. The Chinese government later admitted to holding the boy and his family in “protective custody”.
On 21 April 1997, Jadrel Rinpoche was sentenced by the Intermediate Court of Shigatse Prefecture to six years’ imprisonment and three years’ deprivation of political rights on charges of “colluding with separatist forces abroad” during his search for the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and “revealing state secrets”.
Jadrel Rinpoche served his jail term in Chuandong prison inChina’sSichuanprovince from 1995 to 2002, during which he once sat on a hunger strike to protest the Chinese government’s unjust verdict. Although Jadrel Rinpoche’s six year prison term expired onMay 16, 2001he was held under house arrest in Shigatse in an extended form of detention.
Last November, another senior Tibetan official of the search committee, Jampa Chungla, succumbed to his illness sustained after being denied medical assistance during the long period of incarceration and house arrest. Jampa Chungla’s involvement in the search for Eleventh Panchen began in 1989 when he was appointed as the secretary-general of the committee headed by Jadrel Rinpoche. From 1990 he made great efforts in assisting Jadrel Rinpoche in the search process.
Jadrel Rinpoche was born in 1940 in Namling in Shigatse and he also served as the director of the Democratic Management Committee of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, the traditional of the Panchen Lamas.
