GENEVA, Aug 26 (AFP) - China's UN mission here Tuesday slammed a report on Tibet written by a European fact-finding team which called the Himalayan region a de-facto colony run by the Communist authorities in Beijing.

"The allegation that Tibet is a colony of China is an out-and-out lie with malicious motives," a mission statement said.

A three-member team which spent five days in Tibet in late April concluded that the place fit the bill as a colonized society and urged Beijing to negotiate as early as possible genuine autonomy for the region.

"Tibet is a society of fear. There is no freedom in Tibet. It is suffocating and Tibetan religious culture is strangled," Cees Flinterman, a law professor and former head of the Netherlands Delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission told a press briefing Monday after release of the report.

Flinterman and his two colleagues urged Beijing to sit down with the Tibetan government-in-exile to negotiate full autonomy for Tibet, warning that the alternative to dialogue could be violence.

They said non-parisan countries like Norway could host the talks. Other recommendations championing the cause of autonomy for Tibet included a call for the Chinese government to place restrictions on the migration of their nationals to Tibet and to allow human rights organizations to establish a presence there.

"Marco Polo...described Tibet in his writings as a province of China," Beijing's mission retaliated.

"I suspect that these people were not in Tibet on any fact-finding missions, but on missions for spreading their precooked fabrications in order to misguide the world opinion."