The Chinese sites of US-based Internet giants MSN and Yahoo! have published a list of most-wanted Tibetans released Friday by the Chinese government.

The list includes the photographs and names of 24 Tibetans Chinese authorities accuse of involvement in protests in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, last Friday, March 14. The grainy photographs are apparently taken from video footage shot during the unrest, in which Tibetans angry at Chinese rule of their country damaged and burned Chinese-owned shops and stoned ethnic Chinese civilians.

Chinese security services routinely take video and still pictures at demonstrations and other protests. A tourist who witnessed the unrest in Lhasa told FRANCE 24 he had seen Chinese riot vehicles equipped with video cameras.

Published on Yahoo!, MSN

The list – published in identical form on several leading Chinese-language portals – provides a hotline number informants can use to contact the authorities. The list appears under the headline “Chinese police circulate a wanted list for suspects in the Tibet riots.”

The Chinese-controlled Tibet Daily reported Friday that two of the alleged perpetrators on the list had already been taken into custody, according to the AFP.

The list appeared Friday on leading Chinese sites sina.com and news.qq.com. It also appeared as the main story on the Yahoo! China home page (http://cn.yahoo.com/), and on an inside page on the MSN China portal (http://cn.msn.com/).

“China is the world champion at censoring the Internet, and we’ve seen their success at keeping information from leaking out of Tibet and the other provinces this week,” says FRANCE 24’s Julien Pain. ”This time they’re using the Internet to track down Tibetan protesters. This is new.”

Pain, who follows China’s Internet policy closely, says the US companies could face controversy over the list. Yahoo! has in the past been accused of providing evidence to the Chinese government about political dissidents.

The London-based Free Tibet Campaign issued a call for Yahoo users to boycott the company. “It beggars belief that Yahoo! is acting as China’s right-hand man in its brutal crackdown on Tibetan protesters. Yahoo! knows that anyone arrested has no access to legal representation,” said spokesman Matt Whitticase, adding: “Free Tibet campaign calls on Yahoo! subscribers to cancel immediately their Yahoo! accounts.”