A Spanish judge wants to question eight Chinese leaders about the suppression of an uprising in Tibet last year.

National Court judge Santiago Pedraz suspects that the officials, among them the ministers of defence and state security, may be guilty of genocide.

Mr Pedraz has written a letter to the Chinese authorities saying he would like to visit China to talk to the men. He is waiting for a reaction from Beijing.

Mr Pedraz submitted the request after a Tibetan rights groups, the Tibet Support Committee, filed suit against the Chinese officials in 2008.

The group accuses the Chinese government of suppressing protests by Tibetans in March 2008. The Tibetan government-in-exile says 203 Tibetans were killed and about 1,000 hurt in China's crackdown. Beijing insists that only one Tibetan was killed and has in turn accused the "rioters" of killing 21 people.

Pedraz says that if the accusations made in the complaint are proven, they would constitute crimes against humanity under Spanish law.

"The Tibetan population would appear to be a group that is persecuted by the cited authorities for political, racial, national, ethnical, cultural, religious or other motives universally recognised as unacceptable under international law," he wrote.

Since 2005, Spanish justice officials have operated under the principle of universal jurisdiction. This permits national courts to try crimes against humanity, even if the crimes were not committed within their borders and even if leaders of other states committed them.

The suit against the eight is an extension of another complaint filed by the Tibet Support Committee in 2006.

That suit accuses Chinese leaders, including former president Jiang Zemin and former Prime Minister Li Peng, of torture and crimes against humanity as well as genocide allegedly carried out in Tibet during the 1980s.

Beijing has condemned the accusations of genocide in Tibet as slander and it has accused Madrid of trying to interfere in its administration of the Buddhist Himalayan region.

China has ruled Tibet since 1951, a year after sending troops in to "liberate" the remote region.