PARIS, April 1, 2008 (AFP) - China's ambassador to France has apologised for comments by a Chinese embassy official who compared the violence in Tibet to recent rioting in a Paris suburb, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Tuesday.

Fillon said the French interior minister had protested to the Chinese ambassador and 'suggested that all (French) police guarding the embassy of China be withdrawn since these police had been compared to Chinese forces in Tibet.'

'The ambassador reacted immediately to offer his excuses and to state that he wanted the police to stay at the embassy,' the prime minister told France Inter radio.

Diplomat Qu Xing last Wednesday noted that 1,000 French police were sent to Villiers-le-Bel outside Paris in February in a raid that followed three days of riots in November.

'One thousand police officers were sent into a small city of 26,000 residents,' said Qu in a radio interview.

'Would you have allowed a United Nations mission in to see what was going on at Villiers-le-Bel?' he asked.

After the interviewer objected to the comparison, saying that tanks were not sent to the suburb, the diplomat said 'we did not send tanks' but rather armoured vehicles to Tibet.

He rejected the use of the term 'repression' to describe the Chinese crackdown in Tibet, where protests to mark the anniversary of an uprising against Chinese rule descended into lethal violence.

Hundreds of French police raided Villiers-le-Bel on February 18, arresting several suspected ringleaders of the violence in which more than 100 police officers were wounded. There were no reports of injuries during the raid.