Watch the video: footage puts the Dalai Lama in distress – 87-year-old asks little boy for forgiveness.
STORY: Excitement about the Dalai Lama. The spiritual leader of the Tibetans has to justify himself for an incident at the end of February this year. The 87-year-old apologized on Monday for a situation captured on video in which he asked this boy to “suck his tongue”. After the February incident became known, there was a wave of indignation online, to which the Dalai Lama and those around him have now responded. “There is a video clip circulating showing a meeting where a young boy asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama if he could hug him,” the exile leader’s Twitter account said in a statement. “His Holiness would like to apologize to the boy and his family, as well as his many friends around the world, for the hurt his words may have caused.” The statement also said the Dalai Lama often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful manner, even in public and in front of cameras. “He regrets the incident,” said the text, which was then read out by a member of the Tibetan exile parliament. The Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet, is viewed by Beijing as a dangerous separatist. For decades he has campaigned worldwide for linguistic and cultural autonomy in his homeland. Today he lives in the northern Indian city of Dharamsala in a complex next to a temple, surrounded by green hills and snow-capped mountains.