BEIJING, August 6, 2008 (AFP) - US and British activists staged a dramatic protest in Beijing on Wednesday, scaling a pole and unfurling giant 'Free Tibet' banners close to the stadium where the Olympics will open in two days.

Police arrested the four members of the Students for a Free Tibet group after the stunt, the state-run Xinhua news agency said, reporting on the first major protest around the Olympic Village in the run-up to the Games.

The two Britons and two Americans raised Tibetan flags and two 140-square-foot banners near Beijing's iconic 'Bird's Nest' stadium, pictures released by the group showed.

The banners, which read in English 'One World, One Dream: Free Tibet' and 'Tibet Will Be Free', were up for more than an hour before Chinese police managed to rip them down, the group told AFP.

'We did this action today to highlight the Chinese government's use of the Beijing Olympics as a propaganda tool,' one of the British protesters, Iain Thom, said in a message recorded while he was unfurling the banner and released on the group's website.

'They're whitewashing their human rights record on Tibet.'

The arrested group had still not contacted overseas supporters 12 hours after the action, although it was not known if they were still being detained or had been deported, a US-based spokeswoman told AFP.

The protest came despite unprecedented security around Beijing in the run-up to the Games, as China tried to avoid a repeat of protests that dogged the torch relays journey through Europe, the United States and parts of Asia.

Campaigners promised further actions throughout the Games, a move that would hurt the Chinese authorities' hopes of using the Olympics as a showcase of the country's dramatic economic changes over the past 30 years.

'This is only the beginning of a sustained effort of non-violent action that will bring attention to human rights abuses in Tibet, and that will happen throughout the Olympics in Beijing and around the world,' Brianna Cayocotter, spokeswoman for Students for a Free Tibet, told AFP from Hong Kong.

China's Olympic organisers swiftly condemned the protest.

'As far as we know, four foreigners gathered illegally and we express our strong opposition to that,' Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organising committee, told reporters.

'We firmly oppose any attempt to politicise the Olympic Games. We have related laws in China. We expect foreigners to respect those laws.'

Activists seeking to pressure China over a range of issues have long promised to use the Olympic Games to raise awareness of their causes, which range from arrests of dissidents to Internet censorship.

Students for a Free Tibet have been relentless campaigners against what they see as Chinese repression in Tibet, the western region known as the 'rooftop of the world' that has been under Chinese rule since 1951.

In April, they staged a protest at Mount Everest base camp against plans to take the Olympic torch to the mountain and they unfurled a giant banner along the Great Wall of China exactly a year before the opening ceremony.

The group, and other Tibetan dissidents, complain of ongoing political and religious repression by Chinese authorities, while China maintains it has helped the region to develop.

The issue came to a head in March when peaceful protests erupted into riots in the regional capital Lhasa, prompting a brutal crackdown by Chinese authorities that has been widely condemned around the world.

Exiled Tibetan leaders say 203 people died in the Chinese clampdown on the unrest, which spread to neighbouring Tibetan-inhabited provinces of western and southwest China.

China insists it acted with restraint and that its forces killed only one Tibetan 'rioter'.