KATHMANDU, Nepal — A young nun was shot dead, a man wounded, and 14 children taken away by Chinese border guards as they tried to escape across the Himalaya from Tibet, surviving refugees told the Daily Telegraph.

The shooting was witnessed by scores of western mountaineers camped nearby.

Seventy-five men, women, and children started out, often walking at night to avoid security patrols, but only 41 made it to the Nepalese capital Kathmandu.

A 24-year-old woman described her escape as the survivors labored up the snowbound 18,753-foot Nangpa Pass, which links Nepal to Tibet.

She said: “We were walking in line. Before the shooting we knew the soldiers were after us, so we started to walk quickly.

“They warned us to stop, then they started shooting. We were running. The bullets were landing near us. The nun who died was 100 yards ahead of me. I saw her fall down. I was lucky. A bullet tore my trousers, but it missed me.”

The refugee, who was a farmer in Tibet, asked not to be identified to protect her family who remain in the country.

After the shooting earlier this month, she hid for eight hours in the snow with two other women before venturing out.

They walked past the body of the dead nun, who she said was 17-year-old Kalsang Namsto, face down in the blood-stained snow with a bullet wound in her back.

Another victim, Kunsang Namgyal, 20, was shot twice in the leg and arrested, the young woman said.

The party had started that day’s march at 8 p.m. the previous evening, and the young woman was finally able to rest 28 hours later when she fell asleep on some rocks inside Nepal at midnight on September 30.

The refugees then walked for a further eight days into the lowlands before reaching a road and taking a bus to Kathmandu.

The incident was played out in front of scores of horrified western mountaineers camped on nearby Mount Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain.

An unnamed British climber told the pressure group International Campaign for Tibet that they watched “Chinese soldiers quite close to Advance Base Camp kneeling, taking aim and shooting, again and again, at the group, who were completely defenseless.”

A British policeman and mountaineer who was at the camp, Steve Lawes, said about 30 minutes later the area had been “taken over” by Chinese forces that marched a group of children away.

“The children were in single file, about six feet away from me. They didn’t see us. They weren’t looking around the way kids normally would. They were too frightened,” he said.

“The atmosphere was very intimidating. We were doing our best not to do anything that might spark off more violence.”

Around 2,500 refugees make the dangerous journey across the mountains to Nepal every year.

Most of them, like the young people in the latest group, plan to carry on to India to take courses in Tibetan language and religion, which are banned in Tibet.

Yesterday, at a refugee reception center in Kathmandu, the survivors were given new clothes, bowls of rice, and identity documents for their new life in exile.