SHANGHAI  Weeping and yelling, “Tibet is not free,” a group of red-robed monks on Thursday disrupted a carefully scripted tour for foreign journalists in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, as Chinese officials tried to portray the recent Tibetan riots as the work of thugs and separatists.

The 15-minute protest by about 30 monks, who spoke first in Tibetan and then switched to Mandarin, was in the Jokhang Monastery, one of Tibet’s holiest shrines. The protest, videotaped by reporters, ended after government handlers shouted for the journalists to leave and tried to pull them away, an Associated Press correspondent on the tour said in an interview.

The protest erupted during a tour of the temple. Some of the monks shouted that there was no religious freedom in Tibet and that the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, had been wrongly accused by China of orchestrating the protests to disrupt the Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing in August. Some journalists said one monk complained that the government had planted fake monks in the monastery to talk to the reporters.

It was unclear whether the protesting monks were arrested. The government later said that the monks had lied but would not be punished.