BEIJING, October 25, 1995, (Reuter) - China has purged the abbot of a Tibetan temple who sparked a fierce row between Beijing and the exiled Dalai Lama over the reincarnation of the second most senior monk in Tibetan Buddhism, officials said Wednesday.

Chadrel Rinpoche was formally removed last month as head of the management committee running the Tashilunpo monastery in the town of Xigaze, an official said by telephone from Xigaze.

The abbot was also leader of a committee searching for the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.

The official refused to give a reason for the abbot's removal or to give further details of the purge in the Tashilunpo monastery and temple, the seat of the Panchen Lama, who is second only to the exiled god-king Dalai Lama in the spiritual hierarchy of the deeply-religious Himalayan region.

The abbot vanished in May, apparently into state custody. Tibetologists said he was detained in the southwestern city of Chengdu on May 17. Chinese officials have said he was undergoing medical treatment.

He is reported to have been detained on suspicion of notifying the Dalai Lama his search team had identified a six-year-old Tibetan boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as the recipient of the spirit of the 10th Panchen Lama, who died in 1989.

The Dalai Lama's announcement last May of the recognition of the "soul boy" enraged China, provoking a stream of abuse against the Dalai Lama, whom it accused of using the move to try to split Tibet from China.

Beijing has branded the Dalai Lama's choice as illegal and void because he failed to seek China's approval.

Beijing has regularly accused the Dalai Lama of trying to split China and of fomenting an independence movement in the region since he fled into exile after an abortive uprising in 1959.

China maintains it has final say over senior lamas under terms of a 1792 Qing Dynasty agreement and that both the Dalai and Panchen lamas were approved by Beijing.

Officials of the Religious Affairs Bureau in Xigaze had issued an order on July 14 appointing eight Tibetans to lead the new management committee of Tashilunpo, the London-based Tibet Information Network said in a statement.

The head of the new committee was identified as Sengchen Lobsang Gyaltsen, a hard-liner who has long called publicly for tighter management of monasteries and is vice-chairman of the Tibet People's Congress, or parliament, the pro-Tibet group said.

Sengchen Lobsang Gyaltsen, who takes over the Panchen Lama's position as nominal leader of the monastery, has not remained a monk and so, like the late Panchen Lama, cannot be a full member of the monastery or its committee, the group said.

The day-to-day running of the temple would be carried out by Lobsang Tsering, it said.

Another prominent monk of the Tashilunpo management committee, Gyaltrul Rimpoche, has also been removed after he was detained in a police raid on the monastery on July 12 after monks disrupted a meeting in the monastery the day before, the Tibet Information Network said.

Officials declined to say whether they were any closer to announcing the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.