China reinforced its troops near the Indian border with mountain climbers and martial arts fighters shortly before a deadly clash this month, state media reported.
Five new militia divisions including former members of a Mount Everest Olympic torch relay team and fighters from a mixed martial arts club presented themselves for inspection at Lhasa on June 15, the military newspaper China National Defense News reported.
State broadcaster Central China Television showed footage of hundreds of new troops lining up.
Photo: AP / Maxar Technologies
Tibet military commander Wang Haijiang (汪海江) said the Enbo Fight Club recruits would “greatly raise the organization and mobilization strength” of troops and their “rapid response and support ability,” the China National Defense News reported, although he did not explicitly confirm their deployment was linked to ongoing border tensions.
The new troops were recruited with the aim of “strengthening the border and stabilizing Tibet,” the paper said.
Chinese and Indian troops clashed later that day in the Ladakh region 1,300km away. India says 20 of its soldiers were killed in brutal hand-to-hand combat that day, while China suffered an unknown number of casualties.
Both sides have blamed each other for the battle, which was fought with rocks and clubs.
In related developments, construction activity appeared to be under way on both sides of the contested border in the Karakoram mountains this month, satellite images showed.
The images released last week by Maxar Technologies, a Colorado-based satellite imagery company, show new construction activity along the Galwan River Valley, even as Chinese and Indian diplomats said military commanders had agreed to disengage from a standoff there.
The images appeared to show that the Indians had built a wall on their side and the Chinese had expanded an outpost camp at the end of a long road connected to Chinese military bases farther from the poorly defined border, experts said.
A sequence of Maxar images of the river bend where the clash occurred in the weeks before and after the clash showed that construction had expanded up the Galwan Valley toward the Line of Actual Control from Chinese bases, Maxar vice president Steve Wood said.
Additional reporting by AP
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